Author Archives: weeklysift

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

Transcending Ideology

March 26, 2012 – 1:44 pm

By protecting the lawbreaking license for other powerful individuals, [the political and media classes] strengthen a custom of which they might avail themselves if they too break the law and get caught. It is a class-based, self-interested advocacy. That is why belief in this prerogative and the devotion to protecting it transcend political ideology, partisan affiliation, the supposed wall between political and media figures, and every other pretense of division within elite classes. — Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice For Some

In this week’s sift:

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Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

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Glenn Greenwald Lays Out the History of “Elite Immunity”

March 26, 2012 – 1:20 pm

If you’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s columns at Salon (or reading a Greenwald-influenced blog like the Weekly Sift) you won’t be surprised by anything you find in his recent book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.

Still, I found it striking to see so many individual issues laid out together and presented as a progression. It’s easy to get outraged at any one of them — say, that banks are foreclosing homes illegally and yet no bankers are going to jail — and miss the overall point: We are losing the rule of law.

If you are rich enough or powerful enough, you can break American law — either with complete impunity (like, say, Dick Cheney) or maybe paying wrist-slap fines that are a reasonable cost-of-doing-business (like Bank of America). What’s more, if anybody thinks you should be punished the way ordinary people are when they break the law, media pundits from the Right and Left alike will set them straight: Leona Helmsley was right; like taxes, the law is for “little people”.

It’s tempting to think things were always this way, but they really weren’t. This has all happened in living memory. Yes, the rich and powerful have always had better lawyers than the rest of us, and they’ve always gotten a little extra benefit of the doubt from judges and police. But never before has American society so completely accepted in principle that different rules should apply to the elite.

Glenn Greenwald traces this back to a single epochal event: President Ford pardoning Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. Nixon had resigned before the Senate could hold an impeachment trial, so Ford’s pardon meant that no Nixon trial would ever be held.

At the time the pardon was hugely unpopular, and is probably why Ford lost his re-election bid to Jimmy Carter in 1976. But looking back, the whole affair is kind of quaint. People at every level of the administration below Nixon went to jail, including Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell. What’s more, the pardon itself was completely above board: Ford announced it in a national speech, and the presidential power to pardon is explicitly listed in the Constitution. The political price Ford paid in 1976 is exactly how the Founders envisioned keeping the pardoning power under control.

It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening now. The Bush administration broke a long list of laws: torture, spying without warrants, lying to Congress, and many others. No one has even been charged with these crimes, much less tried or punished. Like President Ford, President Obama has covered for his predecessor. But he hasn’t issued explicit pardons on national TV. Instead, he has just quietly let the whole thing drop, and occasionally claimed some dubious version of the state-secrets privilege to shut down court cases. Beyond occasional statements that we must “look forward, not backward”, President Obama has never even attempted to justify this policy to the American people.

And the outcry from the mainstream media has been … non-existent, unless you count the mainstream pundits who periodically scoff at the idea that the law should be enforced.

This didn’t happen all at once, and the successive chapters of Greenwald’s book present the gradual drift away from the rule of law. Watergate was followed by Iran-Contra, where once again pardons were issued. This time, though, it wasn’t just the president (Reagan) who was protected. President Bush the First pardoned high-ranking officials a level or two down from the president (like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger). In this way, Bush guaranteed that the accusations would never reach the president (or himself, in his previous role as vice-president).

In the Bush II administration, the pardon was issued by the very president whose administration was under suspicion. Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak scandal, but never served time — and so was never tempted to flip on his boss, Vice President Cheney. (Greenwald points out this important fact about the Plame Affair: It only reached the point it did because another powerful institution — the CIA — insisted on pursuing the matter.)

Today, President Obama’s justification for drone strikes like the one that killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki is still secret, but seems unlikely to stand up to scrutiny. (Read the Wikipedia article on targeted killing and see if the line separating it from assassination makes any sense to you.) Obama is undoubtedly counting on his successor to continue the tradition of letting things drop.

Elite immunity entered the private sector with the telecom immunity bill. Telecom giants like AT&T illegally cooperated with warrantless spying of the Bush administration. Lawsuits against the government had already been closed off by state-secrets claims, which denied victims standing to sue. (If you couldn’t prove you’d been tapped, you couldn’t file suit.) But customer lawsuits against the telecoms were still possible and could have cost the companies billions if they lost — which they would have, because they clearly broke the law. But in 2008 a Democratic Congress passed a bill granting them retroactive immunity.

From there, not prosecuting Wall Street for laws broken during the housing bubble or the banks for foreclosure fraud seemed almost reasonable.

During this whole progression, the arguments have built on the one President Ford made: Whatever has happened, it’s time to put it all behind us. (Greenwald suggests trying that argument the next time you’re pulled over for speeding.) Powerful people let other powerful people off the hook, not for their benefit, but for ours, so that we don’t have to go through the ordeal of watching them be tried and punished. (That would be a good argument to try if your spouse catches you in an affair. Uncovering the truth would be too much of an ordeal for her and the kids. Best to let it all drop.)

But since no one is punished, the problem never gets behind us: Elite disrespect for the law only grows, guaranteeing that more laws will be broken in the future.

By pulling all these issues together, Greenwald is making an important point: Each example by itself is a partisan issue, but elite immunity is bipartisan. The powerful in government, industry, and the media are all coming to see themselves as members of a single privileged class. More and more, they close ranks against any attempt to punish crimes committed by one of their own.

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Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes

March 26, 2012 – 1:00 pm

Buried deep in an insight-filled exchange between Grist‘s David Roberts and The Roost‘s Wen Stephenson about media coverage of climate change is this brilliant analogy:

It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit.

Both are long-term threats whose short-term symptoms don’t seem that serious. But they’re covered very differently.

Mainstream journalists routinely tell us that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit will lead to disaster. They don’t worry about sounding like activists or alarmists. When a newsmaker warns about the consequences of the deficit, journalists don’t hunt up some fringe economist to give an opposing view. Further, journalists will bring the deficit into a story even when the sources don’t. If a politician is proposing something related to taxing or spending, a common question is “What would that do to the deficit?”

None of that happens when mainstream journalists cover climate change. Roberts sums up:

the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.

Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy

When action on climate change is blocked, it’s typically reported as a defeat for “environmentalists” — a special interest group. But when action to cut the deficit fails, it’s a blow to our grandchildren.

Roberts’ analogy provides a very simple way to explain what we should be demanding from the media: Cover climate change the way you cover the deficit. It’s not impossible or impractical or a violation of journalistic ethics. They’re already doing it on a different issue.

Today’s wishful thinking: Maybe outright lying by politicians will become less acceptable. I’m not talking about the lies everybody tells about their inner process (like “I don’t pay attention to the polls”), I mean checkable black-is-white lies about history and the state of the world. Maybe the media will start calling attention to these lies and make them counterproductive.

This pollyanna-ish thought is motivated by NPR’s new journalistic ethics handbook, which emphasizes truth over balance.

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen sees this as a rejection of he-said/she-said coverage, where opposing true and false statements are presented without comment.

AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe thinks she has found an example of the new policy: On February 27, NPR ran a Mitt Romney quote and then corrected the part of it that was false. Maybe that practice will catch on with other journalists.

Correcting lies is a good first step. Ultimately, I’d like to hear journalists objectively report “That guy just lied to us” as Rachel Maddow does here:

The Romney Etch-a-Sketch gaffe just underlines what I wrote about him last week:

his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Lauren Zuniga’s poem for the Oklahoma legislators is painful to listen to, but that’s what’s so good about it.

Oklahoma is one of many states passing laws whose main purpose seems to be to humiliate and cause anguish to women who want an abortion. Zuniga strips away all the facades and reacts to the spiteful intention behind the law.

While we’re talking about transvaginal ultrasounds, have you ever wondered how doctors feel about the state using them as tools of humiliation against their patients? This one doesn’t like it, and even thinks some civil disobedience is in order:

When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Zuninga’s poem is an example of the Left getting more aggressive on social issues, a trend I hope catches on. For the longest time we’ve been passive. Unless “family values” types took crystal meth with gay prostitutes, we’ve mostly not challenged their claims to be well-intentioned moral people, motivated by conscience and authentic religious conviction.

It’s time for that to stop. That’s why Fred Clark’s recent article The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal is so important: He points out the suspicious timing of the evangelical revelation that a newly-fertilized ovum has a soul.

They haven’t always believed that. They started believing it after Roe v Wade, and it became undebatable in evangelical circles after abortion became the center of a right-wing political movement.

In other words, this isn’t a political view motivated by theological conviction. The theology was invented to support a political movement already in progress.

Two weeks ago (in the weekly challenge) I proposed that the Left go on offense on women’s issues by pushing the Equal Rights Amendment again. I wasn’t the only one to think of that.

The American public has basically the same view on abortions that it has on guns: There are too many of them, but if my family ever decides that we need one, I don’t want the government telling us we can’t have it.

So whether the public is pro or anti depends on how the question is phrased. This poll bears that out on abortion: In every religious group, large numbers of people who disapprove of abortion still want it to be available.

abortion poll

If you’re not watching Cara Santa Maria’s videos on Huffington Post, you’re not just missing good coverage of science and society, you’re missing a hot chick with glasses whose tag line is “Talk nerdy to me.” I mean, I like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but …

Here she tells us about a new state law to return Tennessee to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you’ve ever wondered about those “Proof Jesus Never Existed” ads that show up in the back of magazines or pop up on the internet, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler: He concludes Jesus existed.

I don’t expect President Obama to raise the Romney dog-on-the-roof issue explicitly. I just think we’ll see a lot of pictures like this:

If a prospective employer asks you to give them your Facebook password, what other morally dubious demands will they make?

And why would an employer trust applicants who are willing to violate FaceBook’s rules and compromise their friends’ privacy like that?

A week ago Friday, the Daily Show had one of its best episodes ever. The opening monologue was funny as usual, but the next two segments were John Oliver’s amazing take-down of our defunding of UNESCO. It culminates with Oliver in Africa (really — not via green-screen) explaining to cute African children why Israel-Palestine politics means they can’t have an education.

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Perfectly Tragic

March 19, 2012 – 12:30 pm

A perfect tragedy should … not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us. … Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes — that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.

— Aristotle, Poetics 

In this week’s sift:

  • The Tragedy of Mitt Romney. There was a good case to be made for electing Mitt Romney president, until he started running. Now he wants to be president so badly that he’ll say anything, even it means turning his back on his own greatest accomplishments. That’s a tragic flaw of Shakespearian proportions.
  • Jim Crow Returns. When did use of the term voter fraud start to ramp up? In 1965, precisely when the Voting Rights Act banned the previous ways of disenfranchising minorities. Now Texas is trying to get the VRA declared unconstitutional.
  • Walking Back Mr. Daisey and other short notes. This American Life did a whole episode on how it was conned by Mike Daisey. (I linked the original episode, so I’d better tell you about this one too.) It’s an interesting lesson in truth and journalism. Oklahoma doctors can lie to prevent an abortion. Pat Robertson is anti-family. Baseless rumors about ObamaCare. Did Goldman Sachs have a moral compass to lose? Public vs. private morality. A skypunch. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Not the similarly-named book from the Hunger Games series, but a fascinating work of speculative anthropology. It turns out that with our current biology, humans can’t survive in the wild without cooking. So humans could not have discovered cooking. Some apes must have discovered it, and then evolved into humans.
  • Last weeks’ most popular post. Where Are We on Citizens United? got 135 views. The most-clicked link was 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.
  • This week’s challenge. Good challenges are hard to come up with. Help me out. Suggest some in the comments.
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The Tragedy of Mitt Romney

March 19, 2012 – 12:25 pm

The most frustrating Republican candidate for me to watch this year is Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is who he is: a small-minded theocrat. Ron Paul is the same old coot with funny ideas that he’s been for years. Newt Gingrich (like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin before him) is a huckster who wants to sell books and get on TV. If those jokers want to run for president and Republicans want to vote for them, that’s their problem.

But here’s the thing about Mitt Romney: At one time, there was a good argument for electing him president. Then he lost faith in himself or in the American people or both. So rather than take his legitimate case to the voters and try to convince them to do the right thing, he decided to pander to the crazies.

I think that mistake is tragic, in the original Sophocles/Shakespeare sense of the word.

President Romney? Seriously? Most Sift readers are liberals, so I imagine you are asking “A good argument for making Romney president? What?”

Here’s the argument: The #1 problem in America today — worse than income inequality or unemployment or racism or the deficit or climate change — is our inability to marshall our forces and even attempt to solve those problems.

That’s why “Yes We Can” was such an appealing slogan four years ago. At some visceral level, voters didn’t even care what the new president was going to do. We just wanted to believe that he would do something. We wanted to believe that we didn’t have to sit here and watch the oceans rise, soldiers die in pointless wars, college become an unaffordable luxury, debts of all kinds skyrocket, and jobs run away to China.

We were sick of arguing about which party got us lost in this wilderness. Just lead us in some direction that has a chance of getting us home. We’ll follow. That’s all we want.

That’s still what we want, because we haven’t gotten it yet. That’s why President Obama is vulnerable. He accomplished a few noteworthy things during the half-year when he had 60 senators (from the delayed swearing-in of Al Franken in July, 2009 to the out-of-cycle election of Scott Brown in January, 2010), but anybody who was starting to regain faith in the American government lost it again during the debt-limit fiasco last summer.

You can argue (as I often have) that the problem is the intransigence of the Republicans in Congress. But you can’t argue that government is working.

If I were a Romney speechwriter. Mitt could have laid it out to the voters like this:

When I became governor of Massachusetts, I took on the toughest problem the state had: health care. I didn’t hide behind the excuse that the other party controlled the legislature. I started with the best ideas of the conservative Heritage Foundation, I listened to smart people of all political persuasions, and I appealed to both parties’ desire to make life better for the people of our state.

And we did. Today, Massachusetts leads the nation in access to health care. That system is not perfect, but it is working and it is popular. Today, neither party can win a statewide election by opposing it.

Our plan’s success gave the current administration the courage and the model to attack the healthcare problem nationwide. That system also is not perfect and I have many ideas for improving it. But again, it got passed and is being implemented. The framework is there to fix and upgrade.

In areas where the Obama administration did not have a Romney example to build on, they have spun their wheels. The economy continues to sputter. Debts continue to rise. The environment continues to degrade. We are no closer to solving our immigration problem. Our educational system falls further and further behind our competitors in other countries. Every day, it gets more and more difficult for young Americans to start at the bottom and rise to the top.

These are not Democratic issues or Republican issues. They are not problems for the government to solve by decree, or for the market to solve without government, or for individuals to solve without any help at all. These are American challenges, challenges that we must meet together, using every tool at our command.

Government, business, private charities and foundations, parents, teachers, farmers, scientists, factory workers, inventors, consumers, religious leaders, students, entrepreneurs — we all have a role to play. We all have to step up and take action if America is going to continue to lead the world.

What kind of president does America need at this crucial point in its history? Not an inspiring orator, not a mere cheerleader or a symbol or a figurehead. America needs a problem-solver, someone who can engage people of all philosophies, all religions, and all walks of life in the project of making our country great for generations to come.

America needs a president who takes pride in tackling the hard problems and finding real solutions — as I did in government in Massachusetts, in business at Bain Capital, and in the non-profit sector when I organized the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

I’m pretty liberal, so I’m not saying I definitely would have voted for that Mitt Romney. (The Bain Capital part would have been particularly hard for me to swallow.) But I would have had to think hard about it. A lot of people, even a lot of Democrats, would have had to think hard about it. Romney might have become another Eisenhower, blandly pulling together coalitions to do big things like build the interstate highway system.

But Mitt Romney turned his back on that guy. He turned his back on himself and his record. Instead of running as a leader who will listen to anybody, he has become a panderer who will say anything.

What else could he do? I understand why he did it: The Tea Party wave of 2010 should have thrown a scare into any reality-based politician, especially one hoping to win Republican primaries. But there’s more than one way to handle that situation.

  • You can fight it. Say in no uncertain terms that facts are facts, science is science, and economics is economics. You can finesse the social issues. (Traditionally in this country they have been state issues; defend each state’s right to handle marriage and guns and abortion as it sees fit.) But on health care, the economy, and the environment, stand up tall and try to hold your head above the rising tide. Call out bizarre lies like Birtherism and Obama’s Muslimhood. Stand up to the Rush Limbaughs when they become inexcusable. Even if you don’t win, you’ll become the-guy-we-should-have-listened-to. In 2016, you’ll be 69 — still young enough.
  • You can wait it out. That’s what Nixon did during the Goldwater disaster of 1964 and Jeb Bush is doing now. Express your Republican loyalty in vague terms, but don’t let the Party’s descent into the pit get you dirty. Again: 69 is not that old these days. Hillary Clinton is the same age you are — think she’s giving up?
  • You can do something else with your life. Lots of people don’t get to be president. Enjoy your quarter-billion and your beautiful family. Be Commerce Secretary in some future administration, find another Olympics to save, or chair a bipartisan commission to chart Medicare’s future. Herbert Hoover continued a respectable career of public service to age 80. You could too.

Instead, Mitt sold out to the insanity. You can tell he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and so can the crazies. That’s how a nobody like Santorum can get so many votes, even though he and Romney are running on almost identical platforms.

The result. Not only will Mitt Romney lose this year, either at a brokered convention in the summer or to Obama in the fall, but he has trashed his brand. No one — not even most of the people voting for him — believes or trusts Romney any more. In fact, his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Mitt Romney is a man of considerable ability. He could have served this country well — possibly as president or possibly some other way. Now he never will, because he wanted to be president more than he wanted to serve his country, and he tried to take a short cut to the White House rather than walk the long and winding road this era laid out for him.

Great promise undone by a single character flaw — that’s the stuff tragedy is made of.

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Jim Crow Returns

March 19, 2012 – 12:13 pm

A fascinating new analysis technique has added weight to the claim that voter-ID laws are functioning as “Jim Crow 2.0“.

In state after state, the Republican governors elected in 2010 have been pushing voter-ID laws that follow the ALEC template. The Brennan Center for Justice has been on this issue for a long time, pointing out how these laws erect unfair barriers to voting by the young, the old, minorities, and many women (particularly those recently married or divorced, who might not have ID in their current names) — all constituencies that tend to vote Democratic.

Ostensibly, these laws are intended to prevent the voter fraud that allegedly alters elections through the high-risk/low-reward process pictured below:

Lately, judges and the Justice Department have been agreeing with the Brennan Center that disenfranchising marginal voters is not just an unfortunate side-effect, but is the true intention behind these laws.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks had been virtually disenfranchised in many southern states. The Act dismantled the Jim Crow laws that enforced that disenfranchisement, and gave the Justice Department veto-power over any new laws in Jim Crow states that would affect the voting rights of minorities (rather than letting the laws take effect and requiring disenfranchised voters to sue). The Justice Department has used that power to invalidate voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.

The Texas law is particularly egregious. ColorLines reports:

Texas has no driver’s license offices in almost a third of the state’s counties. Meanwhile, close to 15 percent of Hispanic Texans living in counties without driver’s license offices don’t have ID. A little less than a quarter of driver’s license offices have extended hours, which would make it tough for many working voters to find a place and time to acquire the IDs.

Now Texas has struck back: Its lawsuit claims the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, because southern states aren’t being treated the same as northern states. The Supreme Court is probably going to have to decide this.

When they do, I hope they take a hard look at the work of LeoT on Daily Kos. LeoT examines the historical frequency-of-use of terms like election fraud, vote fraud, and voter fraud. (Don’t you just love the Google tools that make this possible?)

All the terms have similar usage patterns except voter fraud. The term was virtually unknown until around 1960, then mysteriously in 1965 its usage began a steady increase, uncorrelated with the other election-fraud terms, until now it gets more usage that vote fraud.

LeoT interprets:

“voter fraud” … increased in usage 15,000% (150x) between 1965 and 2008, while “election fraud” increased 250% (2.5x) in the same period. Apparently, “voter fraud” didn’t matter until you weren’t allowed to disenfranchise minority voters.

Conclusion: The voter fraud issue has been manufactured to justify Jim Crow 2.0.

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Walking Back Mr. Daisey and other short notes

March 19, 2012 – 12:07 pm

As part of a longer article on manufacturing a couple months ago, I linked to This American Life’s episode on Mike Daisey, whose one-man show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steven Jobs” told about worker abuse at the FoxConn plants in China that make iPhones and iPads.

Well, This America Life just retracted that episode. They did an entire new episode explaining what’s wrong with the old one.

Retractions are always tricky, because a listener’s reflex reaction is to forget the whole thing. Never mind. It wasn’t true. That’s not really appropriate here, because (as Ira Glass says in the new episode):

We did factcheck the story before we put it on the radio. But in factchecking, our main concern was whether the things Mike says about Apple and about its supplier Foxconn, which makes this stuff, were true. That stuff is true. It’s been corroborated by independent investigations by other journalists, studies by advocacy groups, and much of it has been corroborated by Apple itself in its own audit reports.

But what’s not true is what Mike said about his own trip to China.

In other words, Mike Daisey fictionalized the story by putting himself in the middle of it.

As best as we can tell, Mike’s monologue in reality is a mix of things that actually happened when he visited China and things that he just heard about or researched, which he then pretends that he witnessed first hand. He pretends that he just stumbled upon an array of workers who typify all kinds of harsh things somebody might face in a factory that makes iPhones and iPads.

And the most powerful and memorable moments in the story all seem to be fabricated.

So the facts you think you know about how iPhones are made — those are true. What’s false is the emotional heft of the story, the stuff that made you pay attention and take it seriously.

In Daisey’s defense, he got into this position in small steps. Fictionalization is a perfectly acceptable technique of theater, which is his monologue’s intended medium. If you understood that the actor Mike Daisey was playing a character “Mike Daisey” who dramatized what the author Mike Daisey had learned in his research — then you weren’t fooled at all.

Where Daisey went wrong was that he stayed in character when interviewed by This American Life, and let himself be presented to TAL’s audience as if he also were a journalist, and as if his story met TAL’s usual journalistic standards.

To their credit, TAL went the extra mile to correct all that. If only all journalists would do the same.

I always have a tough time deciding whether to call your attention to the crazy proposals in state legislatures. The 50 states have hundreds of legislators apiece, so there’s always some lunatic thing on the docket somewhere. Most of them amount to nothing, but you could be pointlessly outraged by them 24/7 if you wanted.

Right now, for example, bills under consideration in Arizona and Kansas would protect a doctor who intentionally lies to a pregnant woman about birth defects in her fetus. Why would a doctor do that? To prevent an abortion, of course.

So the misled woman (and possibly her husband) ends up on the hook to care for the child into the indefinite future, possibly at the cost of millions of dollars. She may or may not find this to be a rewarding life, but whatever else she had hoped to do in this incarnation is over now.

Under current law, she might get some help by suing the doctor who lied to her. But not if this bill passes.

Why do these proposals deserve your attention? Because a similar law is already on the books in Oklahoma (where I assume loco-weed sprouts through every crack in the sidewalk). That fact elevates it above the everyday-insanity level.

Watch this and explain to me why Pat Robertson is known as a family-values guy.

If your conservative relatives are telling you that ObamaCare’s cost estimate has doubled since Congress passed the ACA, they’re repeating what Fox News is telling them. Jonathan Cohn explains how they’re being misled.

Another baseless rumor that is circulating in those multiply-forwarded conservative emails: Muslims are exempt from the ACA’s insurance mandate. Nope.

So the money supply is way up and inflation is no big deal. How long does that have to stay true before Stockholm revokes Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize?

A Goldman Sachs exec blew the whistle on his way out the door. Greg Smith wrote an op-ed: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs in Wednesday’s NYT. His point: Goldman has lost its moral compass, and is now exploiting its clients rather than trying to make money for them.

Several people have pointed out that me-and-the-client-against-the-world wasn’t much of a moral compass to begin with. Dan Denzer parodied:

When I joined the Sith, the mission was all about bringing peace and order to the galaxy.

Robert Reich argues that loss of moral fiber isn’t why investment-bank behavior changed. It changed because government stopped looking over bankers’ shoulders.

While we’re on Robert Reich’s blog, his post on public vs. private morality nails something important.

Republicans have morality upside down. … America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.

There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.

Rick Santorum’s statements about euthanasia in the Netherlands were way off. But when a Dutch journalist raised the issue with a campaign spokesman, he got no contrition whatsoever, just a repeated statement that Santorum is “a strong pro-life person”. Steve Benen sums up on MaddowBlog:

Santorum being ” a strong pro-life person” apparently gives him license to make up nonsense about the Netherlands.

Even though I’m an avid Kindle-user, I have fond memories of physical encyclopedias, from the World Book my parents bought when I was in second grade to the Britannica that was the first big purchase my wife and I made together.

Yeah, we reclaimed shelf space eons ago by giving those volumes away, and I contribute each year to the Wikimedia Foundation (and consider it a good deal in light of how much I use Wikipedia). But I felt a pang of nostalgic regret when I heard that Britannica will no longer publish a print edition. Kids of the future will never have the experience of sitting behind a stack of books taller than they are.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, however, is doing a happy-dance on Britannica’s grave. He even makes a certain amount of sense, the way unsentimental people usually do.

Ever seen a skypunch before?

Rush Limbaugh and most of the rest of conservative talk-radio is broadcast by Clear Channel Communications. Know who owns Clear Channel? Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital.

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Creatures of Society

March 12, 2012 – 12:32 pm

[T]he accumulation therefore of Property … and its Security to Individuals in every Society, must be an Effect of the Protection afforded to it by the joint Strength of the Society, in the Execution of its Laws. Private Property therefore is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing; its Contributions therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered as conferring a Benefit on the Publick, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honour and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or the Payment of a just Debt.

— Benjamin Franklin,
“Queries and Remarks respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania” (1789)

In this week’s sift:

  • Where are we on Citizens United? Financing campaigns with unlimited corporate money has never been popular, and the battle for the Republican nomination shows why. Legislation, constitutional amendments, new court cases — is anything going to fix this?
  • Answering the rhetoric of the rich and other short notes. Cracked magazine is a surprising source of common sense. Limbaugh follow-up. Abused workers pack the products you order online. Are women really people? A judge blocks Wisconsin’s voter-ID law. An orbital view of the Nile at night. Turning greenhouse gases to stone. Why I like Cenk Uygur. And lots, lots more.
  • Book recommendation of the week. I got the Ben Franklin quote above from Common as Air by Lewis Hyde. The history and philosophy of intellectual property in America is more complicated than the entertainment industry would have you believe. The subject launches Hyde into a re-examination of property in general, an issue that’s been on my mind for a while.
  • Last week’s most popular post. The Sift had a slow week. Rush’s Apology and other short notes got 167 views, the first time a short notes post has been the most popular. (Something like 200-300 people get the Sift in ways that don’t show up in those stats.) I know I’m prejudiced, but I think The Republic of Babel deserved more attention than it got.
  • This week’s challenge. I’ve been trying to think of a way for feminism to go on offense, rather than just try to mitigate all the horrible proposals that are out there and respond to clowns like Rush Limbaugh. If women’s-rights issues that seemed settled are debatable again, doesn’t that demonstrate the need to have an Equal Rights Amendment in the Constitution? The 27th Amendment got ratified 203 years after it passed Congress. So why not try to get those last three states the ERA needs? Check out what the National Organization for Women is trying to do.
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Where Are We on Citizens United?

March 12, 2012 – 12:26 pm

So far, the 2012 election cycle has been everything the critics of the Citizens United decision expected. Mitt Romney is leading the race for the Republican nomination not because voters like him or his vision for the country, but because limitless quantities of money are available to tear down any serious rival. Newt Gingrich is able to stay in the race because one tycoon has decided that’s a good idea, and Rick Santorum has a super-rich sugar daddy as well. (Even so, a Romney-supporting hedge fund billionaire thinks the ultra-wealthy have “insufficient influence” on politics. I have a hard time picturing what would please him.)

Meanwhile, it’s been reported that the Koch brothers have pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama in the fall, and other plutocrats allied to them have offered $40 million more. Karl Rove’s Crossroads SuperPACs are planning to raise and spend $240 million, and there are many, many other such groups. That’s all in addition to whatever the Republican Party and its candidate spend.

So despite being opposed to SuperPACs in theory, President Obama has come to the conclusion that going into an election without one would be like playing in the American League without a designated hitter or refusing to take 3-point shots in the NBA; whether you think a rule is good for the game or not, you don’t have the option of moving to a fantasy world where the rule doesn’t exist.

There’s an argument about whether this is hypocrisy on Obama’s part. I agree with Kevin Drum that it isn’t. One of Drum’s examples applies to me: I claim income-tax deductions that I would do away with if I had the power. Playing by the rules and wanting to change the rules are two different things.

More money, more mud. Money equals speech, says the Supreme Court, and more speech means better democracy. But in practice, more money means more negative misleading speech.

With a little bit of money a candidate can get a positive message out and present an attractive image. But before long everyone has seen the beautiful family and its adorable dog. Everyone has heard that you want to turn Washington around and make America great again. Repeating those ads 24/7 doesn’t help you.

But carpet-bombing a state with charges that your opponent wants to strangle grandmothers, sell little girls to the Chinese, and raise taxes to subsidize terrorist training camps — that works. (It works even better if the charges come not from Candidate Smith, but from some untraceable Coalition to Save America From Everyone But Smith.) The more repetition the better. So the more SuperPAC money, the more negative the campaign.

What to do? This is the world wrought by Citizens United. Even Republicans don’t like it.

According to a new poll by pollposition.com … 68% of registered Republicans want money out of the Super PACs and only 21% said they were fine with it.

Democrats and Independents oppose this new unlimited-money politics by even larger margins. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the kind of political system where large majorities could change things?

Imagine that we do. What then? We could pass legislation to mitigate the worst effects of Citizens United. Or we could pass a constitutional amendment that undoes it completely. Or we could elect people who would appoint justices who would reverse the decision. Failing at that, we could craft legal cases carefully and hope to get the Court to change its mind.

People are trying to do all those things.

Legislation. Judge Kennedy’s decision in Citizens United imagined transparency rules that would allow intelligent voters to know where campaign money was coming from. The DISCLOSE Act would have implemented some minimal transparency rules, but Republicans filibustered it in the Senate. Democrats plan to reintroduce it in 2012.

I’ve googled “Republican alternative to DISCLOSE Act” and so far found nothing. GOP.gov says:

The proposed legislation is a punitive measure for associations of persons who choose to exercise their right to free political speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, and affirmed in the Citizens United v. FEC case.

which isn’t the kind of position that leads to compromise.

The Sunlight Foundation keeps track of this stuff. They’re also pushing the SUPERPAC (Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability in Campaigns) Act.

Constitutional Amendments. Senator Sanders of Vermont introduced the Saving American Democracy Amendment. It targets corporate personhood in general:

SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

It prohibits corporate campaign contributions also allows Congress to pass laws limiting campaign spending in general.

Move to Amend has a similar proposal, which goes on to say:

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Such amendments are drawing grass-root support. Several dozen Vermont town meetings passed resolutions of support earlier this month.

Vermonters are not the first Americans to urge that the Constitution be amended to renew the century-old principle that citizens have a right to prevent corporations from buying elections. Referendums have already passed in Boulder, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin. Cities across the country, including Los Angeles, have urged Congress to begin the amendment process. State legislatures in Hawaii and New Mexico have done the same.

Lawrence Lessig points out the Citizens United is not literally a corporate-personhood decision, but instead interprets the First Amendment to protect (in Justice Scalia’s words) “speech, not speakers”. So it’s not that Exxon has a right to speak, but that Congress has no power to limit the spread of Exxon’s message. Lessig’s proposed amendment is simpler:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.

Non-citizens in this case means both corporations and foreign individuals.

Lessig finds it hard to imagine that any such amendment will get the 2/3 majority it needs in Congress, given that infinite corporate money will rally to defeat representatives who support it. (Several elections would go by before the amendment could be ratified.) That’s why he favors a constitutional convention.

Congress hasn’t voted on any of these yet. Any amendment faces a long, slow road. But both Left (Equal Rights Amendment) and Right (Human Life Amendment) have shown that an amendment is a good long-term goal to build a movement around, even if it doesn’t get adopted.

Judicial remedies. Russ Feingold thinks Citizens United was just a mistake, and the Court needs to undo it. “The best thing to do is to get new justices, different justices, who will do the right thing.”

But the traditions of the Court itself work against such a plan. The doctrine of stare decisis requires the Court to respect the decisions of past courts unless and until they prove unworkable. “I wouldn’t have done that” is not a good enough reason to reverse a decision. That’s why major reversals (like Brown v Board of Education) are rare, and usually come after a long process of trying and failing to make the original decision work (as David Strauss explained in The Living Constitution).

The Montana Supreme Court has attempted an interesting end run around Citizens United. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United said:

We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

Five Montana justices said, more-or-less, “Given Montana’s unique history of corruption, things are different here.” That case has been appealed to the Supremes, and it will be interesting to see what they say. Probably they’ll overturn Montana’s decision and reaffirm Citizens United, but Justice Ginsburg might use the occasion to put the Court’s conservative majority on the spot and hold its ridiculous and unpopular reasoning up to ridicule.

Summary. At the moment, we have no immediate prospect of reversing Citizens United. But when you don’t have a bill, you have an issue. Democrats need to pound on this in 2012, because Republicans in Congress are taking positions that are out of step even with rank-and-file Republicans.

A good test case will be Scott Brown. He comes up for re-election this year, and claims to be an “Independent Voice for Massachusetts” rather than a right-wing extremist. He cited a number of reasons for voting against the DISCLOSE Act, including wanting to make it apply to unions as well as corporations, but he never put forward an alternative that he would support. (Republican moderates did the same thing on health care. Snowe, Collins, etc. — they seemed to be considering the ACA and came up with many minor objections to it, but they never said “Add this amendment and I will vote for it.”)

In the old days, the role of the moderates in each party was to craft pragmatic solutions and provide the swing votes to pass them. If they’re not doing that any more — if, instead, they’re just wringing their hands and making excuses for supporting the partisan agenda of their extremist colleagues — then there’s no reason to elect moderates.

The ball’s in your court, Scott. Do you want to do something specific about Citizens United, or are you OK with the system the way it is?

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