Category Archives: Articles

What the CBO Really Said about ObamaCare and the Economy

February 10, 2014 – 8:10 am

File this under: “Liberal media? What liberal media?”

I doubt the Congressional Budget Office expected The Budget and Economic Outlook 2014 to 2024 to be front-page news. They put out these ten-year look-aheads every six months or so, and they don’t usually get much reaction.

But say some news outlets decided to pay attention. You might expect — the CBO probably expected — reporters to focus on the summary. After all, that’s why people write summaries to 182-page government reports with eight appendices. In particular, you might expect articles to focus on the summary’s first line:

The federal budget deficit has fallen sharply during the past few years, and it is on a path to decline further this year and next year.

That sounds like a big deal. Very Serious People have been telling us for years (or more accurately, since Inauguration Day 2009, when they suddenly stopped believing Dick Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” maxim) that the deficit is going to destroy our entire society. We’re going to turn into Greece, locusts will devour our fields, toads will rain from the sky, and so forth. So the fact that this situation is rapidly improving ought to get the VSPs attention.

The numbers are striking: The combined Bush/Obama budget of FY 2009 (October, 2008 to October 2009) had a $1.4 trillion deficit. (Bush’s first proposal for a FY2009 budget had an $407 billion deficit, which had grown to a projected $1.2 trillion by the time Obama took office, due to the economic collapse at the end of Bush’s term. Obama’s stimulus pushed the deficit the final $200 billion on its way to creating 3.3 million jobs, according to a previous CBO study.) FY 2013 ended in October with a $680 billion deficit, and the CBO projects deficits of $514 billion in FY2014 and $478 billion in FY2015.

At that level, this year’s deficit would equal 3.0 percent of the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP)—close to the average percentage of GDP seen during the past 40 years.

So unless you think we’ve been in a Deficit Emergency for the past 40 years, we’re not going to be in one this year or next.

But that’s not what caught everybody’s attention. Instead of looking to the CBO’s summary for the story, the media (led by the right-wing media) looked to Appendix C “Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Updated Estimates”. Because, you know, appendices of government reports are always so fascinating, especially the third appendix.

But even if you only read the appendices, you still have some choice about what the story is. Appendix B, for example, says:

CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will markedly increase the number of nonelderly people who have health insurance—by about 13 million in 2014, 20 million in 2015, and 25 million in each of the subsequent years through 2024 (see Table B-2).

So despite all the scary (and debunked) headlines about cancelled policies and increased premiums, the ACA will make substantial progress on its main goal: Millions more people will have health insurance.

But the cost of that coverage will explode the deficit, right? Well, this report reiterated a previous conclusion:

Considering all of the coverage provisions and the other provisions together, CBO and JCT estimated in July 2012 (the most recent comprehensive estimates) that the total effect of the ACA would be to reduce federal deficits.

But maybe you’re worried about the “insurance company bailout” Republicans have been denouncing, which the rest of the world calls “risk corridors”. If so, you’d focus on this part of Appendix B:

CBO now projects that, over the 2015–2024 period, risk corridor payments from the federal government to health insurers will total $8 billion and the corresponding collections from insurers will amount to $16 billion, yielding net savings for the federal government of $8 billion.

So the “bailout” is a re-insurance plan that the government expects to make an $8 billion profit on.

But anyway, what does Appendix C say?

CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor … The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.

It’s not hard for me to imagine why this might happen: My wife is a (currently healthy) over-55 two-time cancer survivor, and prior to ObamaCare she couldn’t possibly have gotten insurance on the individual market at any reasonable rate. She happens to like her job, but many people in similar situations might decide to retire early (now that they have that option) rather than hang on until Medicare covers them. Similarly, my college roommate has been frozen into his job for the last couple decades, because his son was born with major medical problems that a new employer’s insurance company might write off as a pre-existing condition. Other people might prefer to work part-time, but have been hanging on to full-time jobs for fear of losing their health coverage. Or maybe extended Medicaid or S-CHIP coverage or an ObamaCare subsidy could shift the balance in a struggling household towards having one parent stay home with the kids.

That’s the kind of thing the CBO is talking about: “workers … choose to supply less labor”. It’s a good kind of thing.

So naturally it got covered like this by the conservative media:

Fox News: ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.5 million US jobs, report says

Washington Times: ObamaCare will push 2 million workers out of labor market: CBO

National Review: The CBO just nuked ObamaCare

And not much differently by the mainstream media:

The Hill: O-Care will cost 2.5 million workers by 2024

UPI: ObamaCare to cost 2.3 million jobs over ten years

And even a 180-degree false CNBC headline: CBO says ObamaCare will add to deficit, create reluctant work force — later corrected to allow that ObamaCare “may not add to federal deficit” rather than the accurate “the total effect of the ACA would be to reduce federal deficits”.

CBO director Paul Elmendorf testified before Congress Wednesday morning, and set the record straight. The CBO believes that ObamaCare will increase demand for labor over the next few years, creating jobs rather than killing them.

When reporters began to understand that they’d been scammed into repeating Republican talking points, many of them blamed the Obama administration. National Journal‘s headline: “The White House is Still Terrible at Explaining ObamaCare“. You see, it’s not up to reporters to check facts and inform their readers rather than mislead them. How can they be expected to print the truth when no one spoon-feeds the story to them properly? And why didn’t the White House (which doesn’t control the CBO) anticipate the report, anticipate that Appendix C would be the story, and anticipate that Republicans would twist its statements into pretzels? Shouldn’t they have been prepared for this?

That’s your liberal media in action.

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Subtext in the State of the Union (and its responses)

February 3, 2014 – 11:08 am

You can learn a lot about how our leaders (in both parties) view us by observing how they try to manipulate us.

Once upon a time, state of the union addresses contained major policy initiatives, like when President Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964. But nobody does that any more, especially not in a gridlocked era where nothing is going to get through Congress anyway. 21st-century state of the union speeches (and opposing-party responses) are about politics rather than policy. They’re about moving public opinion, not moving the country.

So you might ask, “Why watch?” And there’s an answer: You can learn a lot about how our leaders (in both parties) view us by observing how they try to manipulate us. When they try to scare us, they reveal what they think we’re afraid of. When they reassure us, they reveal what they think we’re insecure about. When they try to be likeable, they reveal what they think we like. They emphasize issues where they feel strong and avoid issues they have no answers for.

They have spent months polling and testing in front of focus groups. Each has carefully crafted the message it believes will best appeal to its part of the public. Listen hard, and you can tell what part of the public they see as their own.

President Obama. The best way to watch the SOTU is via the White House’s enhanced video. (Here’s their transcript.) You get the same video everyone else uses, plus elucidating slides.

President Obama focused on two themes: inequality (which I explore in “Occupying the State of the Union“) and the dysfunctionality of Congress. Clearly he thinks Congress’ unpopularity works to his advantage:

For several years now, this town has been consumed by a rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government. It’s an important debate – one that dates back to our very founding. But when that debate prevents us from carrying out even the most basic functions of our democracy – when our differences shut down government or threaten the full faith and credit of the United States – then we are not doing right by the American people.

I know Ted Cruz comes from an alternate timeline in which Obama and Harry Reid shut down the government and provoked the debt-ceiling crisis, but here’s all you need to know about that: Democrats applauded the President at this point, while Republicans sat on their hands. They all knew who he was calling to account.

The two themes came together in Obama’s executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, something he can do as federal CEO without congressional action. I hadn’t realized the full political import of this until Rachel Maddow pointed it out: Obama has put every executive in the country on the spot. Are governors going to raise the minimum wage for state contractors? Mayors for city contractors? (Yes in St. Louis.) I’ll bet the sound bite (at the 33-minute mark) tested really well:

No one who works full time should ever have to raise a family in poverty.

Any time the words Obama and executive order appear in the same news story, Republicans start yelling “tyranny”, as if no previous president issued executive orders. (Sunday Paul Ryan described the Obama administration as “increasingly lawless“.)

Clearly, they have identified a set of voters ready to believe this. In reality, though, Obama has been relatively hesitant about executive orders, issuing fewer of them than other recent presidents. He also has put forward no new theories of executive power, such as President Bush’s sweeping notion of the unitary executive.

Republican response. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington gave the official Republican SOTU response (text & video).

I thought Rodgers’ put forward a likeable image. (The conservative American Spectator protested that her “real message” was “PLEASE LIKE ME”.)  She expressed admirable sympathies, but presented little of substance to back up her good intentions. She talked about working to “empower people … to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be”, but the policies behind those words implement the same old Republican wealth-trickles-down-from-the-rich ideas.

A larger question was: Why her? She’s not a major player in the Republican leadership. She’s not a rising star they’re grooming for bigger things. Nothing about her record in Congress picks her out as the ideal person to speak to these particular issues. But she’s a woman and Republicans want to put a token female face on camera to counter the war-on-women meme.

As Ian Haney Lopez says in Dog Whistle Politics:

The right slams affirmative action for making distinctions on the basis of race, even as it has developed its own perverse form of affirmative action, consciously selecting nonwhite faces to front its agenda.

Rodgers is the female version of Bobby Jindal or Marco Rubio, but without the presidential speculation: Republicans can’t possibly be sexist. Look! They have a woman speaking for them.

But the war on women rages on, no matter who’s in front of the camera. The House Republican majority passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, whose purpose is to get private health insurance plans to drop abortion coverage. Last week I pointed to its draconian limitations on rape exceptions.

Rodgers’ talk was also noteworthy for invoking yet another bogus ObamaCare horror story. As Paul Krugman put it:

So was this the best story Ms. McMorris Rodgers could come up with? The answer, probably, is yes, since just about every tale of health reform horror the G.O.P. has tried to peddle has similarly fallen apart once the details were revealed.

Tea Party response. Mike Lee (text, video) did a good job countering the Tea Party’s image as the dangerous lunatics who almost pushed the United States into default last October. The over-arching metaphor of his talk was the journey from Boston (the Boston Tea Party in 1773) to Philadelphia (the Constitution in 1787).

Now, as in 1773, Americans have had it with our out-of-touch national government. But if all we do is protest, our Boston Tea Party moment will occupy little more than a footnote in our history. Hopefully our leaders, reformers and citizens will join the journey from Boston to Philadelphia – from protest to progress. Together we can march forward and take the road that leads to the kind of government we do want.

He mentioned several positive Tea Party proposals in Congress without detailing what they would do. But the mere possibility of “the kind of government we do want” is a significant shift in Tea Party rhetoric. I’ll be interested to see if it catches on inside the Tea Party, or if it’s just for export.

Rand Paul’s response. Rand Paul’s talk was mostly a collection of offensive stereotypes and right-wing fantasies. He used the story of black conservative columnist Star Parker to smear welfare recipients:

She was 23 when she quit her job at the L.A. Times so she could go on welfare. By collecting $465 a month, plus Food Stamps, and by getting a part-time that paid cash under the table, she could rent a nice apartment and earn far more money than working an honest 40-hour week. Later, she said, she had no trouble dropping her daughter off at a government-funded day-care center, selling some free medical vouchers to buy drugs, and hanging out at the beach all afternoon.

It’s Ronald Reagan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queen all over again, or Fox News’ lobster-loving Food Stamp surfer. Are those stories supposed to be typical of the people helped by government anti-poverty programs? Paul seems to think so. After putting a happy ending on Parker’s story — she could only get a real job and climb out of poverty after she gave up her “dependence” on government assistance — Paul says:

I want Star Parker’s story to be the rule, not the exception.

But how is that even possible unless her original situation is the rule? Unless welfare recipients in general are lying, cheating, drug-using, child-neglecting blacks who can get honest jobs whenever they want? I’m sure that’s exactly what Paul’s target audience wants to believe, but is it true? Like Reagan, Paul presents no evidence beyond the anecdote.

Another taffy-pull stretching of the truth was Paul’s claim that Obama has “spent more than a trillion dollars on make-work government jobs”. Actually, that number is somewhere close to zero. For example, a big chunk of the $800 billion stimulus was tax cuts. Some of the stimulus’ other big-ticket items sent money to the states so that revenue shortfalls wouldn’t force them to lay off teachers, and paid for repairs to roads and bridges.

So the next time you drop your kid off at public school or drive across an old bridge, remember that Rand Paul thinks teaching or keeping bridges from falling down are “make-work government jobs”.

Thuggery. The weirdest story of the night was New York Republican Rep. Michael Grimm threatening to throw a reporter “off this fucking balcony” (i.e., the Capitol balcony) for asking a question he didn’t want to answer. “I’ll break you in half,” Grimm warned.

Rudeness to the President. Well, at least this year nobody yelled “You lie!” during the speech, as Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina did in 2009. However, Texas Congressman Randy Webber tweeted:

On floor of house waitin on “Kommandant-In-Chef”… the Socialistic dictator who’s been feeding US a line or is it “A-Lying?”

Another Texas congressman, Steve Stockman (who is Senator Cornyn’s Tea Party challenger in the upcoming primary) walked out of the speech.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence how Southern Republican Congressmen lost their sense of decorum and their respect for the office of the presidency at the precise moment when a black man was sworn in? Did a memo go out, or did they just know what to do by intuition?

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Occupying the State of the Union

February 3, 2014 – 8:59 am

The conventional wisdom about Occupy Wall Street is that it failed. It made a splash and generated headlines, but ultimately it elected no candidates, passed no laws, and didn’t even leave behind a memorable lost-cause proposal like the Equal Rights Amendment. So it was all a big waste of the activists’ effort and our attention.

By contrast, the Tea Party did elect candidates and has influenced all kinds of laws, especially at the state level. Without the Tea Party, the government wouldn’t have shut down last October. You may not consider that much of an accomplishment, but it is proof of continuing influence. The Tea Party may eventually even displace the Republican establishment and take over half of the two-party system.

What has Occupy done to rival that?

But all along, Occupy visionaries like David Graeber were defining success differently:

For the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense. … What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.

The French Revolution, for example, failed to hold power, “but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution … were put in place pretty much everywhere.” Suddenly, it was obvious that monarchy was obsolete. Not only did people around the globe believe that, they believed that they had always believed it.

Now consider President Obama’s 2014 State of the Union and the responses from Cathy McMorris Rodgers (for the Republican Party), Mike Lee (for the Tea Party), and Rand Paul (who seems to be a party unto himself). Maybe it’s not surprising that President Obama would talk about inequality and how difficult it is to stay in the middle class:

Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have  barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled. The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead.

But here’s the interesting thing: The responders accepted that framing of the problem, they just tried to shift the blame.*

Bear in mind how conservatives used to respond whenever liberals tried to make inequality an issue: Wealth has nothing to do with poverty. Wealth is conjured out of the aether by creative capitalists, not usurped from the common inheritance or distilled from the blood and sweat of the laboring masses. So talk about poverty if you must, but don’t talk about wealth and poverty in the same paragraph, because they’re totally separate phenomena. This was still the conservative conventional wisdom two weeks ago, when David Brooks argued (in his own italics):

to frame the issue as income inequality is to lump together different issues that are not especially related.

More than just conservative dogma, some version of that argument has been the conventional wisdom of Very Serious People for decades. It has been fine for liberal politicians to talk about the plight of the poor or the struggles of the middle class, but if they combined that downward-looking and sideways-looking compassion with an upward-looking head-shake at the explosion of wealth among the few, mainstream pundits would start lobbing phrases like “class warfare” and “redistribution of wealth” — warning shots that come just before “Why don’t you go back to the Soviet Union, comrade?”.

But post-Occupy, everybody knows about the 99% and the 1%. And it’s no longer anti-American to point out that the 1% (and mostly the .01%) have owned all the productivity growth of recent decades.

Mike Lee’s Tea Party response doesn’t deny any of this, but instead tries to pin it on government and President Obama:

This inequality crisis presents itself in three principal forms: immobility among the poor, who are being trapped in poverty by big-government programs; insecurity in the middle class, where families are struggling just to get by and can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic insiders twist the immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone else.** … [W]here does this new inequality come from? From government – every time it takes rights and opportunities away from the American people and gives them instead to politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests.

Rodgers points to the same problems, but calls them by a different names and promises that vague, unnamed Republican “plans” will solve them.

our mission – not only as Republicans, but as Americans, is to once again to ensure that we are not bound by where we come from, but empowered by what we can become. That is the gap Republicans are working to close. It’s the gap we all face: between where you are and where you want to be. The President talks a lot about income inequality. But the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality… And with this Administration’s policies, that gap has become far too wide. We see this gap growing every single day.

And this is where the spin becomes obvious, because the metaphor changes: The gap “between where you are and where you want to be” would seem to be in front of you, between you and the people whose examples inspire you to be more successful. Republicans are going to help you bridge that gap, so that you can be rich too.

But as Rodgers gets down to cases, it’s clear she’s talking about a chasm opening up behind middle-class voters, threatening to suck them into poverty as it has already claimed so many of their friends and family:

We see it in our neighbors who are struggling to find job, a husband who’s now working just part-time, a child who drops out of college because she can’t afford tuition, or parents who are outliving their life’s savings. Last month, more Americans stopped looking for a job than found one. Too many people are falling further and further behind because, right now, the President’s policies are making people’s lives harder. Republicans have plans to close the gap.

Even Rand Paul has to recognize the hollowing out of the middle class, though (unlike the others) he sticks to the old-time religion that the rich will save us, if only we let them keep getting richer. (It never worked before, but it will if we give it one more shot.)

Parents worry about their children growing up in a country where good jobs are few and far between. More than ever before, Americans wonder how they’ll afford to send their kids to college, and what will happen if they lose their job. … Prosperity comes when more money is left in the private marketplace. … Economic growth will come when we lower taxes for everyone, especially people who own businesses and create jobs.

Another piece of conservative dogma has been to blame the poor for failing; their laziness, crime, drug addiction, and general irresponsibility is dragging down the rest of us. And if people are falling out of the middle class — losing their jobs, getting their homes foreclosed, failing to send their kids to college — well, that’s their own damn fault. We aren’t failing them; they’re failing us.

Recall the opening shot of the Tea Party’s rebellion, Rick Santelli’s famous rant a few weeks after Obama took office. Backed by a cheering mob of traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli challenged the new president:

How about this, president and administration: Why don’t you put up a web site to have people vote on the internet to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? Or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water? … [Gesturing to include all the traders***] This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hands! [boos from the crowd]

Tuesday night no one was blaming the “losers” for falling out of the middle class, or fantasizing about picking the bones of their foreclosures. Instead, everyone sympathized with growing middle-class anxiety: how hard it is to find good jobs, how hard it is to pay for college, how insecure you feel even if you currently have a good job. Everyone acknowledged that Americans are losing faith in the old nostrums: work hard, study hard, say no to drugs, get married, buy a house, pay your bills … it just doesn’t seem like enough any more. You might do all that and still lose out, even as billionaires get ever richer.

Everyone but Rand Paul is acknowledging that some kind of gap needs to be bridged, that some people have more of this vaguely defined “opportunity” that you wish you had. Mike Lee is even denouncing “privilege at the top”, though he blames this privilege on government favors rather than the normal workings of capitalism.

It’s important to realize what we’re seeing: an early stage in the “transformation of political common sense”. People who believed and may still believe that OWS was horribly misguided and failed completely — those same people see the world differently now. The problem isn’t that a few “losers” are dragging the rest of us down. The problem is that there’s a 99% and a 1%. We’re arguing about what caused that and how to fix it, but we all see the problem now.

Thank you, Occupy.

* Ultimately they’ll lose that argument, because the facts are clearly against them. Look at the graphs: This problem didn’t start with Obama. It started in the Carter-Reagan years. If your explanation doesn’t account for that, you’re just spinning.

I explain it by Carter and the Democrats in Congress turning to the right: de-regulation, lower capital gains taxes, free trade deals, and turning a blind eye to union-busting. That all started slowly under Carter and then really took off during the Reagan administration. The long version of this story is in Thomas Edsall’s The New Politics of Inequality from 1985, but William Anderson of the conservative Mises Institute noted the same thing in 2000:

Republicans like to point to the failures of the Carter Administration and then claim that Ronald Reagan brought us into the present era. Alas, while I prefer Reagan to Carter, I cannot say that the above statement is true. Granted, much occurred during the Reagan Administration that was good, but if truth be known, many of the important initiatives that enabled those boundaries to expand came from Carter’s presidency.

I agree completely, if you reverse the value judgments and define “the present era” as the Second Gilded Age.

** Perversely, the purest examples of cronyism are due to a trend conservatives champion: privatizing public services like prisons or public schools.

*** I love the assumption that the well-compensated wheeler-dealers on the CME represent “America” and the people who “carry the water”. I think it’s arguable that American productivity would go up if the Earth swallowed the Chicago Mercantile Exchange whole. The people who really “carry the water” are the ones who grow stuff and build stuff and deliver services. The water-carrier is the single mother who cuts your hair (and who may need Food Stamps to feed her son), not the venture capitalist who conjured up millions by franchising Supercuts.

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The Fall of Governor Ultrasound

January 27, 2014 – 9:20 am

The indictment, I now realize, is an under-exploited narrative form. Novels have been written in the form of diaries, case notes, and exchanges of letters, but I can’t remember seeing a novel written as an indictment.

It’s got to be an oversight, because the indictment of former Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen makes the potential clear: Within the constraints of the genre’s just-the-facts style, it still manages to build a sense of character and theme.

As the story begins, Bob and Maureen have risen to a new level, and can see yet another level beckoning, but don’t realize yet that they’re already in over their heads. Bob is the handsome, articulate new governor of what has recently become a swing state, Virginia. The Republican Party chooses him to respond to the 2010 State of the Union. He’s elected chair of the Republican Governor’s Association. He’s even being talked about as a likely running mate for Mitt Romney, who needs to reach out to the Christian Right without alienating the mainstream. And if Bob performs well on that national stage, who knows? He could be president himself someday. (If only he hadn’t backed that forced-transvaginal-ultrasound bill just as the war-on-women meme was starting to take off. Rick Perry did the same thing a year before, and nobody called him “Governor Ultrasound“. Bad timing!)

The big stage is full of important people to impress. But there’s a problem: money. The McDonnells were never rich, and then Bob bought property at the peak of the housing boom. (Bad timing again!) It’s so hard to cast the right image when your investments cost you more in mortgage interest than they generate in rent, and you can’t sell without revealing a huge loss. Where is Maureen going to get the designer gowns she needs for the Inaugural Ball and future formal events? How is Bob going to sport a Rolex or tool around in a Ferrari? How is the McDonnell daughter going to get the kind of wedding that an up-and-coming governor ought to be able to give her?

Enter the rich founder of a dietary-supplement company that (like Bob) seems right on the verge of bigger things. Bob and Maureen didn’t meet him until after Bob became governor, but he instantly becomes such a good friend to them — so nice, so generous; all they have to do is ask, and he provides whatever they need. And he asks so little: if the First Couple could only lend his company their names and images and the backdrop of the Governor’s Mansion, if they could lean on the state universities to do some legitimizing research.

Once the wrongdoing begins, the McDonnells are such clumsy criminals that you may end up feeling sorry for them. (Sometimes a lie can be so obvious that it’s almost honest.) They conspire in email and text messages. They know their stock holdings look suspicious, so they sell in December, fill out the year-end form, and then buy the shares back in January. Who could possibly see through such clever subterfuge?

But don’t worry, Bob and Maureen, a happy ending is on its way. The indictment ends with 14 reasons you should be admitted to a special federal academy, where experienced criminals can teach you how it’s really done.

Is he the right comparison?

Having looked at the indictment, you should also consider the McDonnell’s defense, which claims this is all politics. Some outside observers also say the case “is no slam dunk” because of “the fine line between what is illegal versus what is unseemly”. The point here is that McDonnell made no specific official action as governor to benefit his “friend”: McDonnell didn’t veto a law or appoint somebody to a state office in direct response to a gift. He sold the trappings and influence of the governorship rather than its constitutional powers.

In MSNBC reports on the case, you’re likely to see comparisons to a Democratic governor in jail: Rob Blagojevich, who famously tried to sell the Senate seat Barack Obama left to become president. But a comparison friendlier to McDonnell would be Don Siegelman, former Democratic governor of Alabama, also now in prison.

Or is he?

Like McDonnell’s defenders, Siegelman’s (including 60 Minutes) point out that some elements of the classic bribery story are missing: Siegelman did take an official action (re-appointing to a state board someone who had already served on that board under previous governors), but received no personal benefit (the appointee made a contribution to a fund campaigning to bring a state lottery to Alabama, a policy Siegelman favored).

In essence, both Siegelman and McDonnell claim that they didn’t cross the line between the man and the governor: Siegelman used his powers as governor to pursue his policies as governor, perhaps in an unseemly way. McDonnell used his prestige as a man (who happened to be governor) to reward someone who gave him personal gifts. In each case, the question is whether the law is being enforced in a politically biased way: How many other politicians could we send to jail under the same standards? And is there a partisan reason why we don’t?

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One Week’s Worth of Crazy

January 27, 2014 – 8:26 am

You could get angry, or you could just laugh.

Every week as I put the Sift together, I face the same question: Do any of the outrageous, infuriating, and downright crazy quotes from conservative pundits or office-seeking Republicans or clueless rich people that I ran across this week deserve my readers’ attention?

If this were a pure partisan blog, the answer would always be yes: Outraging your fellow partisans is good. It raises energy. It keeps them focused. And from a blog-traffic point of view, something that gets a reader’s goat is likely to be shared or linked to or commented on.

But I view the Sift as more opinionated than partisan. That may sound like splitting hairs, but here’s what it means to me: I’m liberal but not manipulative. I see myself working for my readers (helping them stay sane while processing the news) not working on them, to keep them wound up. And besides, anyone who’s looking to get wound up — liberal or conservative — has plenty of other options. The Sift should strike a calmer, more contemplative tone.

Well, most of the time. Because there’s another factor at work: the 47% factor, you might say. Conservatives count on their ability to have two messages. They can go to a meeting of their partisans and say totally over-the-top stuff, and then put on their sane face and talk to the general public as if crazy-time never happened. Then I run into low-information voters who tell me, “He sounds pretty reasonable.”

So when the mask does drop and the ranting starts, it’s important that people hear about it.

At least sometimes. I still don’t want to walk around in a constant state of outrage, and I don’t want to do that to my readers either. So rather than pass on each and every crazy thing I see or hear, once in a while I think I’ll just bundle together the ones I ran into that week and try to present them a sense of humor.

So let’s start with a joke. Or rather, with the Iowa Republican Party’s idea of a joke:

Those Iowa Republicans, what a bunch of kidders!

Because, like, racism is so funny! And it doesn’t really exist, it’s just a word to throw at people you don’t like when they do humorous but totally understandable things like shoot innocent black teen-agers or concoct conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate.

At least this joke has a punch line: After the post started getting noticed, Iowa Republicans took it down, blamed a contractor, and fired him. I’d love to have heard that conversation. Did they say, “That’s just wrong” or something more like “I know we were laughing about that this afternoon, but those kind of jokes have to stay in-house”?

Most of all I’d like to know: Did the contractor get the flowchart from the guy who fired him?

Next are two examples of what I’ve started to call “guillotine bait”: very rich people displaying cluelessness on a let-them-eat-cake scale.

Tom Perkins is a wealthy venture capitalist who published a letter in The Wall Street Journal.

I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.” … Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

I haven’t plugged The Distress of the Privileged yet this week, but what a great example of privileged distress. The rich — they’re just so persecuted these days! Sucks to be them, don’t you think?

And Kristallnacht? No, I have another historical parallel in mind. As Queen sang on the Highlander soundtrack: “Don’t lose your head.”

More guillotine bait came from Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman who appears on the reality-TV show Shark Tank. Asked for his reaction to the claim by Oxfam that “The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world”, O’Leary responded:

It’s fantastic. And this is a great thing because because it inspires everybody, gives them motivation to look up to the 1% and say “I want to become one of those people. I’m going to fight hard to get up to the top.” This is fantastic news, and of course I applaud it.

If I were living on a dollar or two a day, I suspect everybody who’s safe, warm, and well-fed would look the same to me. But perhaps I underestimate the world’s poorest, and the sight of multi-billionaires inspires them in a way that mere millionaires can never manage. If so, though, O’Leary might show more concern about what exactly it inspires them to do.

Next we come to  Congressman Steve Pearce of New Mexico. He recently published a memoir in which he compares the family to the military chain of command: The husband is on top and the role of a wife “is to voluntarily submit”. But her submission isn’t “a matter of superior versus inferior”. Perish the thought.

This kind of stuff is much more convincing when it comes from the people who are submitting rather than the ones suggesting somebody else submit (voluntarily, of course). So Steve, how about this: In Congress, why don’t you voluntarily submit to Nancy Pelosi for a while? Then you can report back on whether it makes you feel inferior.

Virginia State Senator Dick Black (not to be confused with the similarly-named character in Hardcore) has dropped out of the race for Congress after his previous opposition to criminalizing spousal rape became an issue. (He wasn’t opposed per se, he just thought the point was moot because he couldn’t imagine how a husband raping his wife could leave any evidence.) He has also referred to emergency contraception as “baby pesticide“, and he segues smoothly from same-sex marriage to incest and polygamy. Polygamy, he says, “is just more natural” than homosexuality, because “at least it functions biologically.” (Especially if all your wives voluntarily submit, I suppose.)

Congress will be much less interesting without you, Dick.

Mug shot of an improving economy

Presenting the “faces of an improving economy” during his state-of-the-state address, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced an unemployed-until-recently welder. It turns out he may not have been entirely typical of Wisconsin’s unemployed: He’s a sex offender with two felonies and three drunk-driving convictions on his record.

The scary thought is that this might not be a mistake. Maybe Governor Walker really pictures the unemployed that way.

A candidate in the Republican congressional primary in Illinois’ 9th district has identified the source of our national problems:

“I am a conservative Republican and I believe in God first,” [Susanne] Atanus said. She said she believes God controls the weather and has put tornadoes and diseases such as autism and dementia on earth as punishment for gay rights and legalized abortions.

“God is angry. We are provoking him with abortions and same-sex marriage and civil unions,” she said.

I think it’s more likely God gets angry when complete idiots put their words into His mouth. But that’s just my opinion.

Another one of God’s ventriloquists, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, also knows the hidden cause of a social problem. Campus sexual assault (which President Obama announced a task force on Wednesday) is caused by “sexual liberalism” — free birth control, co-ed dorms, decriminalized marijuana, and Sandra Fluke. Because campus rapes never happened in the Happy Days before all that, I suppose.

The implication here is that there is some kind of slippery slope between voluntary sex (which could be enabled by, say, free birth control) and involuntary sex. Can’t say I’ve ever noticed it.

I cheated just a little: This week wasn’t entirely typical because the of the RNC Winter Meetings, where Mike Huckabee said Republicans aren’t fighting a War on Women, they’re fighting a “War for Women“.

Way to turn the spin around, Huck. You see, Republicans want to remove contraceptive coverage from ObamaCare “to empower [women] to be something other than victims of their gender.”

If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.

Critics are making unflattering comparisons to Rick Santorum’s bankroller Foster Friess (whose recommended form of birth control was an aspirin held between a woman’s knees) or 2012 Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin (who denied rape pregnancy is a problem because a woman’s reproductive system shuts down during rape).

The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman explains “Why Republicans Keep Calling American Women Sluts“:

The morality clearly reflected in these statements is that sex is inherently sinful … and a virtuous woman doesn’t have sex except for those rare occasions when her husband wants to impregnate her. That’s why Huckabee can say—sincerely, I’m sure—that it’s an insult for Democrats to say women should have access to contraception, because that’s the same as saying women lack virtue.

But I think Huckabee is onto something more than just the evil of sex: Refusing to help people empowers them to help themselves. It’s like if Huckabee fell off a cruise ship: Throwing him a life preserver would just cast him as a victim of his mammalian need to breathe air. Better by far to empower him to swim to safety on his own — or, even better, to control his pulmonary system by spontaneously developing gills.

I hope Huckabee doesn’t just take his message across America; I hope he extends it to other situations: Cutting Food Stamps empowers the poor to feed themselves, and shows faith in their (and their children’s) ability to control their appetites. Cutting unemployment empowers people to find jobs, even when there are no jobs. Ending tax breaks for fossil-fuel companies empowers them to find oil without handouts from Uncle Sugar.

Wait, maybe that last one goes too far. Nobody likes an extremist.

Anyway, Huck’s speech made the NYT’s Gail Collins reminisce about 2008, when Huckabee “was a front-runner for a while, because he was the most likable candidate.” Then it was the usual tragic story: He got a talk show on Fox News and started running with a bad crowd.

That’s just what I happened across this week. Next week — nah, I’m not going to do it. Maybe one or two outlandish things will make it into the weekly summary, but an article-length round-up probably shouldn’t happen more than once a quarter.

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Catching Up With the Judges

January 20, 2014 – 10:24 am

While the Supreme Court has been relatively quiet lately, a lot has been going on in lower courts. This week I’ll tackle the recent net neutrality and same-sex marriage cases. In future articles I plan to address cases related to the NSA, voting rights, and drug-testing welfare recipients.

Net neutrality. The headlines about this decision said things like “Verizon Wins, Net Neutrality Loses“. But the overall impact of the D. C. Court of Appeals ruling is a little more ambiguous and complicated. Reading it was like watching the tape of a football game where my team gets way ahead, but I’ve already heard that they lost. On its way to ruling in Verizon’s favor, the court trashes one Verizon argument after another. “We lose this?” I kept asking myself.

Net neutrality is one of those important-but-somewhat-technical issues that it’s hard to get the public excited about. The issue will go months at a time without making headlines, so when it comes up again even people who have read about it before are likely to say, “Wait, I know this. What is it again?” Wikipedia defines it pretty well:

Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.

The practical problem is that you don’t have a lot of choices if you want fast broadband internet access in your home. The local cable monopoly may be the only option if you aren’t near a major city. If you are, you might have a choice between Comcast and Verizon FIOS — a Coke/Pepsi choice where competition is tightly confined to battlefields that don’t rock the corporate boat too much.

In short, broadband providers have a lot of market power. And the technology has shaken out in such a way that they have the power not just to impose a bad deal on you, but also on “edge providers” of services like Netflix or Google. Comcast has its own video-on-demand service, for example, so what if it decided to block its users from accessing Netflix? Or maybe Netflix connections could be inexplicably glitchy, unless Netflix paid Comcast a big fee. (Nice service you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.)

Verizon could decide to compete with Comcast by charging smaller fee (or no fee at all) so that its users got Netflix cheaper. But why not just charge the same fee, give your own on-demand service the same advantage, and make money hand-over-fist? If there were five or six broadband providers, one of the smaller ones would probably break ranks. But with two or three, probably not. (BTW: That’s the same logic why none of the larger wireless companies should be allowed to take over T-Mobile.)

Until Tuesday, FCC rules made that illegal. Those are the rules that got thrown out by the D. C. Appeals Court. But along the way, the Court rejected almost all the arguments Verizon made for why it should be allowed to do whatever it wants with its network and charge whatever the market will bear.

The relevant law is Telecommunications Act of 1996, which gave the FCC the mission to promote the spread of broadband internet access. The main argument is over how to do that: Verizon thinks that making things as profitable as possible for broadband providers (like itself) encourages the providers to build out the broadband infrastructure. Net neutrality advocates argue that letting a few big corporations essentially “own the internet” discourages the real creativity in the system, which comes from edge providers trying to create the next gotta-have-it service like Netflix or YouTube. A Verizon-owned internet will be less interesting than a net-neutrality internet, and hence will inspire less consumer demand.

In short, it’s yet another version of the eternal supply-side vs. demand-side argument.

Anyway, the TCA classifies internet companies into two bins: telecommunications carriers and information-services providers. Telecommunications carriers are regulated like the wired phone companies: They have to offer their services to everyone on a more-or-less equal basis. Information-services companies have more leeway.

The gist of the court ruling is that the FCC has classified cable companies as information-services providers, but that its net-neutrality rules regulate them like telecommunications carriers. So the FCC’s net-neutrality rules can’t stand. But — and this is the observation that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat — it’s totally within the FCC’s current powers and mandate to just reclassify the cable companies.

So net neutrality is dead. But if the FCC wants to revive it, all they have to do is issue new rules. Judge Laurence Silberman dissented from the majority opinion that the FCC has this power, but since Verizon technically “won”, they can’t appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court unless and until the FCC tries to use the power that the Court says it has.

In short, this is all a long way from over.

Same-sex marriage. A month ago, if I had to guess which two states would be the last ones to legalize same-sex marriage, I might have picked Utah and Oklahoma. Since then, though, federal judges have struck down the amendments to both state constitutions that restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. Both judges build on the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision that struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act last summer, but they do it in somewhat different ways.

You may remember that while I liked the outcome of Windsor, I was no fan of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, which I labeled “mush” and lumped together with Chief Justice Roberts’ voting-rights-act decision in a subtle, soft-spoken article I called “This Court Sucks“.

Here’s why Kennedy’s Windsor opinion sucked. Same-sex marriage cases all revolve around these three questions:

  • Does the right to marry (which the Court has often affirmed as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution) apply to same-sex couples?
  • Are laws targeting gays and lesbians (like laws targeting blacks or women) inherently suspicious as vehicles for irrational prejudice, and so subject to some form of heightened scrutiny from the courts?
  • Whatever standard of scrutiny you choose, do the laws serve legitimate purposes that outweigh the limitations they put on the couples’ rights?

Kennedy dodged all that. He waxed eloquent for a while on the plight of same-sex couples and the unreasonable prejudices against them, and then announced that DOMA was struck down.

That’s exactly the result I want, Justice Kennedy, but how did you get there? The purposes Congress imagined DOMA serving — whatever they were; you don’t list them or examine them — don’t “overcome”, but are they failing to overcome a high standard or a low standard?

The victims of Kennedy’s judicial malpractice are lower court judges like Terence Kern and Robert Shelby, who have been left to rule on similar-but-not-identical cases without any clear guidance. In his Oklahoma ruling, Kern avoids technical legal terms like sucks and mush, but makes more-or-less the same point I did:

The Windsor Court did not apply the familiar equal protection framework, which inquires as to the applicable level of scrutiny and then analyzes the law’s justifications. … Thus, Windsor does not answer whether a state may prohibit same-sex marriage in the first instance. Nor does Windsor declare homosexuals a suspect class or discuss whether DOMA impacted a fundamental right, which would have provided this Court with a clear test .

So Kern does his best to puzzle out the WWJKD question:

This Court has gleaned and will apply two principles from Windsor.

Ordinarily, a lower-court judge just “applies” principles from a higher-court ruling, rather than having to “glean” them first.

Lacking clear guidance, Kern avoids declaring either a fundamental right to same-sex marriage or that gays and lesbians are a protected class. That means that Oklahoma’s same-sex marriage ban only needs to have “rational relation to some legitimate end”.

Shelby took a somewhat different path to the same destination in the Utah case. He made an insightful observation about what exactly has changed in recent years: not the Constitution, but our understanding of what it means to be gay or lesbian.

The State accepts without contest the Plaintiffs’ testimony that they cannot develop the type of intimate bond necessary to sustain a marriage with a person of the opposite sex. … Forty years ago, these assertions would not have been accepted by a court without dispute. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association still defined homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), and leading experts believed that homosexuality was simply a lifestyle choice. … The State presents no argument or evidence to suggest that the Plaintiffs could change their identity if they desired to do so. Given these undisputed facts, it is clear that if the Plaintiffs are not allowed to marry a partner of the same sex, the Plaintiffs will be forced to remain unmarried. The effect of Amendment 3 is therefore that it denies gay and lesbian citizens of Utah the ability to exercise one of their constitutionally protected rights.

So Shelby is in a position to demand a higher standard of the state, that their ban on same-sex marriage is “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.” But ultimately, both Kern and Shelby end up arguing that the ban does not satisfy even the lowest standard, the rational-basis test.

In each case, the state trotted out the same justifications: that the state has an interest in promoting “responsible procreation” among “naturally procreative” couples, and that opposite-sex couples provide the ideal setting for raising childrent.

Both judges make basically the same counter-argument, but Shelby says it best:

[T]he State poses the wrong question. The court’s focus is not on whether extending marriage benefits to heterosexual couples serves a legitimate governmental interest.  No one disputes that marriage benefits serve not just legitimate, but compelling governmental interests, which is why the Constitution provides such protection to an individual’s fundamental right to marry. Instead, courts are required to determine whether there is a rational connection between the challenged statute and a legitimate state interest. … The State of Utah has provided no evidence that opposite-sex marriage will be affected in any way by same-sex marriage. In the absence of such evidence, the State’s unsupported fears and speculations are insufficient to justify the State’s refusal to dignify the family relationships of its gay and lesbian citizens. …

Applying the law as it is required to do, the court holds that Utah’s prohibition on same-sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and due process under the law. The State’s current laws deny its gay and lesbian citizens their fundamental right to marry and, in so doing, demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason. Accordingly, the court finds that these laws are unconstitutional.

Both cases are being appealed and will undoubtedly end up before the Supreme Court. But what’s clear from the rulings is that the opponents of same-sex marriage will have to come up with a new set of arguments if they hope to prevail: It’s not enough to argue that opposite-sex marriage is good; they’ll need to argue that same-sex marriage is bad, which they have not done and may not be able to do, particularly when the person they need to convince is the Supreme Court’s swing vote, Justice Kennedy.

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To Experience Real Religious Discrimination, Turn Atheist

January 13, 2014 – 8:20 am

From the War on Christmas to the ObamaCare contraception mandate, the media gives a lot of respect to the idea that Christians might be persecuted in America, or at least that their religious freedom might be in danger. But two recent stories underline a contrasting point: If Christians really want to know what religious discrimination is like, they should try being atheists.

Christian pastor Ryan Bell is literally trying, and it’s not going well. In the spirit of A. J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically, Bell announced that he would live 2014 as an atheist and chronicle his experiences on his A Year Without God blog. In his announcement post, he portrayed his experiment partly as a religious identity crisis and partly as an attempt to answer a friend’s question: “What difference does God make?”

How could Bell explain the difference unless he had tried both? So:

For the next 12 months I will live as if there is no God. I will not pray, read the Bible for inspiration, refer to God as the cause of things or hope that God might intervene and change my own or someone else’s circumstances. (I trust that if there really is a God that God will not be too flummoxed by my foolish experiment and allow others to suffer as a result).

I will read atheist “sacred texts” — from Hobbes and Spinoza to Russell and Nietzsche to the trinity of New Atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett. I will explore the various ways of being atheist, from naturalism (Voltaire, Dewey, et al) to the new ‘religious atheists’ (Alain de Botton and Ronald Dworkin). I will also attempt to speak to as many actual atheists as possible — scholars, writers and ordinary unbelievers — to learn how they have come to their non-faith and what it means to them. I will visit atheist gatherings and try it on.

No doubt Bell anticipated writing about challenges like: Could he really “live as if there is no God”, or would his sensibilities rebel at the vision of a godless universe? Would he get depressed without God to give him hope? Would his moral character weaken? Would he have to abandon his experiment if he faced a true life crisis? Near the end of the year, would he look forward to the day when he could return to religion? In 2015 would he, like King David, be “glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord”?

What actually happened is that in the first week he lost all his sources of income.

I was an adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University (APU) teaching Intercultural Communication to undergrads, and Fuller Theological Seminary, coaching doctoral candidates in the writing of their dissertation proposals. Both are Christian institutions of higher learning that have a requirement that their instructors and staff be committed followers of Jesus and, obviously, believers in God. They simply feel they cannot have me as a part of the faculty while I’m am in this year long process. … The other work I do is consulting with congregations … the fact that I was embarking on a year without god was just too much for them.

His friends have not ostracized him, but he hadn’t realized that was even a risk. Apparently it was.

We still love you!

So many of my closest friends and colleagues have said this to me in the past few days. My initial, unspoken reaction was, “Well, I certainly hope so.” Now I understand that this is not a forgone conclusion. I didn’t realize, even four days ago, how difficult it would be for some people to embrace me while I was embracing this journey of open inquiry into the question of God’s existence.

The lesson seems pretty clear: If you’re having doubts about God’s existence, don’t tell anybody.

The second story concerns Hemant Mehta, author of the Friendly Atheist blog. Mehta lives in Naperville, Illinois. In October, the local American Legion post in nearby Morton Grove stopped giving financial support to the Morton Grove Park District because one of the district’s board members was refusing to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. Mehta asked his readers to make up the difference, and raised $3000 to more than replace the Legion’s $2600. There were no strings. Mehta says, “the only ‘ethical implication’ of accepting money from atheists is that you get money.”

The Park District turned it down. So did the library, after the library’s treasurer referred to Mehta and his readers as “a hate group” and backed up that accusation by reading “a couple of the religiously-inflammatory and expletive-ridden comments posted on Mehta’s Friendly Atheist Facebook Page.” (As if you couldn’t find offensive comments on any popular Facebook page, including Christian ones.) She asked the other trustees: “Would you take money from the Klan?”

The apparent reference is to Georgia’s refusal to let a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan participate in its Adopt-a-Highway program. But there the Klan would get a benefit:

The program provides advertising for sponsors who agree to clean a stretch of road on a sign posted along the stretch.

Mehta, on the other hand, was asking for nothing: no plaque, no mention in the newsletter, nothing. Just take the money. He comments:

I firmly believe that if the money came from the “Friendly Christian,” none of this would be an issue. The “A” word is just freaking everybody out.

Finally, the Niles Township Food Pantry cashed the check. If any of the food it bought burst into flames when the needy said grace over it, I haven’t heard.

I know: As examples of religious persecution, neither of these stories holds a candle to the Holocaust or the Inquisition. Nobody is dying, languishing in prison, or getting tossed into a fiery furnace. But in the same way, they put into perspective fundamentalist Christian problems like not being able to display a Ten Commandments monument at the state supreme court, or your monument maybe being forced to share public space with other people’s monuments, or the law forcing you to treat gays and lesbians as if they were part of the general public, or being offended that someone wished you “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”.

But still, Christians can give no-strings-attached money to the local library without worrying that they might be likened to the KKK. Compared to the alternatives, being Christian in America is still a pretty cushy gig.

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The Sifted Bookshelf: Angry White Men

January 6, 2014 – 10:51 am

They may not feel powerful, but they do feel entitled to feel powerful.

One of the privileges that still comes with being white or male is that you get to be an individual. When you do something unusually good or bad, the media doesn’t take you as a representative of all whites or all men. You’re just you; you did something; it’s news.

So nobody remarked on George W. Bush being the United States’ 43rd consecutive white male president, but 2008 buzzed with speculation that the 44th might be black or female. For example, pundits questioned whether a woman could be tough enough to be commander-in-chief of the military, but nobody has ever successfully made an issue of whether a man can be compassionate enough to be nurse-in-chief of Medicare, or understand small children well enough to be teacher-in-chief of Head Start.

Nobody ever asked why a white man had killed President Kennedy or tried to kill President Reagan. The gunmen had names; their stories were presumed to be personal. When Bernie Madoff conned his investors out of billions, nobody asked “What makes a white man do something like that?” or “What should be done about the white male swindler problem?”

Sikh temple shooter.

Even when the perpetrators themselves frame whiteness or masculinity as an issue, the media tends not to pick it up. Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 69 people at a camp for liberal youth in Norway, saw himself as a crusader against a Muslim takeover of Europe. His manifesto advocated a restoration of European “monoculturalism” and “patriarchy”. Wade Michael Page, killer of six in the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin, was acting on his long-held white supremacist views. In each case, this motivation was spun mostly as a symptom of personal instability, and not of a dangerous cancer in the white community.

Mad as hell.

The upshot is that although we are surrounded by angry white men — on talk radio, on the internet, on the highways, in the workplace, in the NRA and the Tea Party, in the “men’s rights” movement, and in countless acts of domestic violence or public mayhem from Columbine to Sandy Hook — we aren’t having a national discussion about the anger problem of whites or men or white men. That’s because we don’t see them as “white men”; we see them as individuals whose stories reflect unique psychological, political, or social issues. (By contrast, consider how little Michelle Obama has to do to evoke the angry-black-woman stereotype.)

Enter Michael Kimmel and his book Angry White Men.

Chapter by chapter, Kimmel calls attention to angry white men wherever they are found: the loudest voices on the radio, the school shooters, the anti-feminist men’s-rights movement and its Dad’s-rights subculture, the wife beaters, the workers who go postal, and the white supremacists. He asks and answers the question you seldom hear: What makes white men so angry?

What links all these different groups … is a single core experience: what I call aggrieved entitlement.

Aggrieved entitlement is the belief that you have been cheated out of status and power that should have been part of your birthright. (It’s a close relative of what I have called privileged distress: the feeling that advantages you never consciously acknowledged are slipping away from you.) White men are angry, Kimmel claims, because

They may not feel powerful, but they do feel entitled to feel powerful.

How it was supposed to be.

High standards and failure. White men also feel judged (and judge themselves) according to the standards of fathers and grandfathers who received the full white-male birthright, who didn’t have to compete with other races on an almost-level playing field, and who could count on subservient wives, mothers, daughters, and Girls Friday at the office to rally behind their leadership rather than outshine them or make demands.

You want a recipe for anger? Here it is: I’m a failure and it’s not my fault.

The seldom-examined setting for white male anger is failure, or at least failure according to the standards of another era. Dad and/or Grandpa supported a family on one job, and when he got home he commanded respect from his family. His marriage lasted, and his kids were not being raised by a resentful ex-wife on the other side of the country. When Dad or Grandpa was young, he was comfortable in his masculinity. He hunted deer and lettered in football. Girls waited by the phone for him to call, and when he paid for dinner they knew they owed him something.

It’s not that way any more, and it’s not my fault. Don’t look at me like that.

The rich and powerful speak for me.

The visible spokesmen for angry white men may be millionaires like Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump. But such success is what their listeners wish they had, not what they do have or will ever have. Kimmel observes:

It’s largely the downwardly mobile middle and lower middle classes who form the backbone of the Tea Party, of the listeners of outrage radio, of the neo-Nazis and white supremacists— in many cases literally the sons of those very farmers and workers who’ve lost the family farms or shuttered for good the businesses that had been family owned and operated for generations.

Violence. This sense of being cheated out of what was promised — and being judged as if it had been delivered — interacts badly with another part of the traditional male identity: Men have the privilege/right/duty to make things right by violence.

I don’t want to be violent, but I can be.

That is the plot of just about every action movie with a male hero: A man who would rather be left alone to live his life and take care of his family is confronted with an injustice that can only end if he becomes violent and defeats it. If he successfully wields violence he is a hero. If he remains peaceful he is a wimp.

And so, while many women also feel cheated and judged unfairly, they tend not to snap in a violent way. Kimmel observes that all the recent rampage school shooters (other than the Korean Virginia Tech shooter, whose race evoked a discussion, and another Korean shooter since Kimmel finished writing) have been white males, mostly from rural and suburban areas. Kimmel imagines what would happen if they’d all been, say, inner-city black girls

Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago.

Likewise,

In my research, I could find no cases of working women coming into their workplaces, packing assault weapons, and opening fire, seemingly indiscriminately.

The explanation is simple: When a man feels disrespected — on the job, in his school, in his family — the disrespect threatens not just his personal identity, but his identity as a man. (The archetypal Man is entitled to respect; if you are not being respected, you are failing as a man.) The obvious response is to re-assert manhood through violence, simultaneously righting the scales both socially and psychologically.

The Real and the True. One point I made in “The Distress of the Privileged” was that the “distress” part of privileged distress is very real: If you have convinced yourself that you don’t have any unfair advantages, and then those advantages start to go away, it feels like persecution. You’re not making it up; there are real events you can point to.

Kimmel covers this ground by distinguishing between what is “real” and what is “true”.

White men’s anger is “real”— that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely. But it is not “true”— that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation.

And what is most likely to be untrue is the object of the anger. When your well-paid factory job is shipped overseas and you can’t find another one, the villain isn’t the teen-age Chinese girl who does your old job for fifty cents an hour. If you can’t support a family on your income, the villain isn’t your working wife or her reasonable demand that you share the housewife duties she doesn’t have time for any more. If the value of your house crashes, the villain isn’t the black family that got talked into a sub-prime mortgage it couldn’t afford. If you judge yourself by the standards of another era, the villains are not the people whose fair competition keeps you from meeting those standards.

The collapsing pyramid. Patriarchy and racism are both systems of dominance that are coming apart. The white men who feel the change first are the ones just one step up from the bottom: Their step collapses, throwing them in with the “lesser” blacks and women, and the pyramid resettles on top of them. The white men higher up the pyramid want the victims of this collapse to identify with them and with the pyramid that gives them their status: What’s wrong isn’t that the pyramid itself is unfair — as you now can clearly see, being at the bottom of it. What’s wrong, they want you to believe, is that the pyramid is collapsing. You should defend the pyramid, blame the other bottom-dwellers for your loss of status, and maybe one day your one-step-up can be restored.

They know that’s not going to happen; they’re just counting on you not figuring it out. The Masters of the Universe are not going to bring your job back from China. Wal-Mart is not going to make room for your family shop to re-open. Bank of America is not going to forgive your underwater mortgage. Agri-business is not going to rescue your family farm.

The rich white men are not going to rebuild the lower step of the pyramid, no matter how much power they get. And nobody is making room for you on the upper levels.

If you have to blame someone, blame the people who promised you something they couldn’t (or decided not to) deliver. They sold you a bill of goods. Don’t buy another bill of goods from them.

But the best solution of all would be to get past the anger, forget about how things were supposed to be, and just start dealing with the situation as it is. Like a lot of people you never expected to have anything in common with, you find yourself at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s an unfair pyramid.

Let’s bring it down.

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Themes of 2013: Minority Rule

December 30, 2013 – 10:20 am

It’s hard to remember now how 2013 began: with the Republicans (having believed their own skewed-polls rhetoric) in shock at having lost the 2012 presidential election by five million votes, and having lost even the aggregate House of Representative tally by 1.3 million (even if gerrymandering gave them a majority of seats). But … but … but … the deficit … unemployment … Benghazi … Obama is the worst president ever … real Americans are conservatives …

How could it have happened?

Demographics. The closer they looked at the exit polls, the worse it got. Sure, Obama got 93% of the black vote; everybody expected that. But also 71% of Latinos and 72% of Asians. (Asians? Aren’t they supposed to be the model minority? Don’t they have more makers than takers? How could they side with the Kenyan usurper?) 60% of 20-somethings and 55% of 30-somethings. 70% of folks who list their religion as “none”.

All those groups are growing. The groups that kept the election from being a complete blow-out are the ones that seem to be shuffling off center stage: Over-65s went for Romney 56%-44%. White men voted Republican 62%-35%. (In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, white men were the electorate. How can you get 62% of white men and lose?)

So 2012 wasn’t just a loss for Republicans, it was a loss that augured bigger losses in the future. All the predictions Jonathan Chait had made the previous February in “2012 or Never” seemed to be coming true, and it was looking like Never. As the balls fell and the corks popped to welcome 2013, Republicans were asking: What do we have to do to become the majority again?

Change? Some answers seemed obvious. (The best collection of these answers was put together by College Republicans.) Stop talking about Hispanic immigration as if it were the barbarian invasion of Rome. Tone down the anti-gay rhetoric (not because the gay vote is so pivotal, but because homophobic hate-mongering turns off young straights). Stop pandering to the radical fringe on abortion and other social issues. Come up with competing conservative answers to questions that loom ever larger to middle-class Americans: Where are the jobs going to come from? How are the kids going to pay for college? What will happen to me and my family if I get sick?

The new year brought an obvious issue to focus on first: gun violence. (The first Sift of 2013 started: “This week everybody was talking about guns again.”) Sandy Hook was still fresh when the new Congress was sworn in, and (unlike the response to previous mass shootings), the furor didn’t seem to be dying down.

By wide margins, the public supported universal background checks for gun buyers, re-instituting the assault-weapon ban that President Bush let lapse, and banning the high-capacity magazines that had played such a key role in the Tucson shooting. For a time, some kind of bipartisan gun bill looked to be a no-brainer.
Then we saw the pattern that would repeat itself again and again all year: Some well-funded extremist group (in this case the NRA) rallied the conservative base with scare tactics (Obama was planning to confiscate guns by executive order!), threatened primary challenges against wavering Republicans, and whipped the Republican leadership into line.

In the end, a Republican-led filibuster blocked even a weak-tea gun bill that 54 senators supported.

Something similar happened to immigration reform: In this case a bipartisan bill made it through the Senate only to be refused a vote by the Republican House leadership, which offered no alternative.

Take that, Hispanics! Screw you and your fastest-growing-voter-bloc BS. Think we care? Think again!

Ditto for women, who are already a voting majority. Again and again, Republicans pandered to the an extreme anti-abortion or anti-birth-control minority with the most outrageous proposals and rhetoric. The most extreme recent example is Michigan’s “rape insurance” law, which won’t allow insurance companies to cover abortion (even in cases of rape) in any general-purpose health plan. Unless you planned on being raped and paid in advance for a special abortion rider on your healthcare policy, you’re out of luck.

Did anybody notice a post-2012 let-up in Republican anti-gay rhetoric or an olive branch to people who don’t go to church? Or a Republican jobs plan? Or any healthcare plan beyond “repeal ObamaCare”? Nope.

In the fall, poll after poll showed large majorities against a government shutdown or a threat to the debt ceiling. Did that matter? No.

This isn’t how we’re used to seeing political parties behave. So what’s going on here? How do Republicans plan to persuade a majority of Americans to support them?

It’s simple: They don’t.

Minority rule. That is the single biggest development of 2013: Republicans have given up on the idea of persuading a majority to agree with them. Instead, conservatives plan to rule from the minority.

In the old days that might have meant a military coup or something, but modern minority-rule techniques are much more imaginative. The strategy is simple: take advantage of all the hurdles that exist between the will of the majority and the enforcement of a law. If you can knock that majority down just a little at each stage, what looked like a tidal wave can become just a little ripple.

Defense in depth. Consider all of the structural things Republicans have been pushing. Stop looking at them one-by-one and think about them as a system.

  • Voter suppression. You don’t have to ban people from voting, just make it difficult. Limit the days and hours and number of voting machines so that you create long lines. Find excuses to remove legitimate voters from the roles. Require IDs they don’t have, and don’t accept the IDs they do have. Change the rules late in the game. Plenty of determined people will manage to vote anyway, but all you’re trying to do is knock the numbers down.
  • Unlimited money. You don’t have to buy elections outright, you just want to control them a little. With unlimited money, you can keep incumbents in line by threatening a primary challenge based on fringe issues. You can eliminate the need for volunteers by hiring professionals. You can keep candidates in the race longer or knock them out earlier. You can create issues out of nothing, de-legitimize real issues, or just confuse the voters. You can make the campaign obnoxious and ugly, so that voters don’t want to participate.
  • Gerrymandering. If you concentrate the other party’s voters in a few districts, you can give your party an advantage in a majority of districts, even if you have fewer voters. The paradigm here is Pennsylvania, where a slim Democratic voting majority led to a 13-5 Republican advantage in members of Congress. The Senate itself is a form of gerrymandering: It took 7.7 million Democratic votes to elect Dianne Feinstein to the Senate, but only 102 thousand votes put Republican Lisa Murkowski in. Their Senate votes count the same. (The conservative pipe dream of repealing the 17th Amendment would make this situation worse.)
  • Shadow government. You may think your state laws come from the legislators you elected. Wrong! If your legislature has a Republican majority, chances are your state laws are being written by the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), a national pseudo-legislature whose controlling members are corporations rather than people.
  • Emergency managers. Here’s a neat trick: Cut state aid to cities and their school districts, then when they get into financial trouble replace their elected governments with “emergency managers“, i.e., dictators appointed by the governor, who can void union contracts and refuse to fund pensions already earned. More than half of the black citizens of Michigan have lost their right to local government. If the voters don’t like it and vote for repeal, pass the law again and make it referendum-proof. Think that can’t happen in your state or your town? Why not?
  • The Hastert Rule. Immigration reform is one of a number of ideas that are believed to be supported by a majority of House members, but never come up for a vote. Shutting down the government, on the other hand, had only minority support, but it happened. How does that work? The House operates by the majority-of-the-majority principle, a.k.a. the Hastert Rule. Speaker Boehner won’t bring bills up for a vote unless a majority of the House Republican caucus supports them. So instead of needing 218 votes (a majority) to block something, you can do it with only 117 (a majority of the 233-member Republican majority). The logic of primary challenges is similar: It doesn’t matter what the majority of voters in a Republican congressman’s district think, if a majority-of-the-majority (i.e., a majority of voters in his Republican primary) want to throw him out.
  • The filibuster. In the Senate, 41 votes can block legislation. Until recently, 41 votes could also block presidential appointments, which Republicans were using to prevent President Obama from altering the current conservative bias in the judiciary. So the senators representing the 21 smallest states — total population 35.4 million, or about 11% of the country — can block any law.
  • Hostage-taking. Sure a minority can block things, but how can they pass laws of their own? Simple: take hostages. That’s what the 2013 government shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis was about. An extremist minority could block the government from taking necessary actions, and what it wanted in return for not burning down the house was to repeal ObamaCare. Ordinarily that would take a majority, but not if you have a gun to the economy’s head.
  • Nullification. A similar tactic was implicit in a new use of the filibuster to nullify existing laws. Refuse to approve anybody to certain enforcement positions. So, you would need a majority to scrap all the nation’s labor laws, but they can’t be enforced if the National Labor Relations Board doesn’t have a quorum, and you can block appointments via the filibuster. Voila! No labor laws! (Nullification is what caused Democrats to eliminate the filibuster on presidential appointments.)
  • Judicial activism. Even if a law makes it past all those hurdles, it just takes five Supreme Court justices to declare it unconstitutional. The integrity of the system depends on judges not abusing their power, but sometimes they do. During the Warren Court of the 1960s, judicial activism was a liberal thing. That’s ancient history now, as we saw most clearly in the ObamaCare decision. At the time the Affordable Care Act was passed, there was no legal precedent to justify invalidating it, and few legal analysts were concerned about the possibility. (Salon’s Andrew Koppelman: “The constitutional limits that the bill supposedly disregarded could not have been anticipated because they did not exist while the bill was being written.”) But in a matter of months, a new interpretation of the Commerce Clause was invented and gained the support of the Court’s five conservative justices. (Justice Roberts narrowly saved the law by re-interpreting the individual mandate as a tax rather than a penalty, but the new narrowing of the Commerce Clause stands and could skewer any number of government programs in the future.) Conservative judicial activism has been key in the whole minority-rule enterprise, by unleashing the unlimited money and opening the door to voter suppression, which red states have been happy to walk through.

Across the board, Republicans are defending and in some cases sharpening the tools of minority rule. So if they annoy a majority of Americans with their extremist agenda, who cares? Democrats would need a really large majority, say 5-7%, just to overcome gerrymandering and get even in the House, not to mention getting 60 votes in the Senate. And even then, unlimited money can usually buy a handful of Democrats with a local special interest, and the Supreme Court can invent new kinds of “religious freedom” or “corporate rights” to keep any real change from happening.

The long term threat. In the long run, a dedicated majority can get its way. If Democrats can win the state legislatures in 2020, they can de-gerrymander both the congressional districts and the legislative districts within the states. If Democrats can hold the presidency long enough, they can end conservative judicial activism. Then, if that same dedicated majority will keep those Democrats honest, there’s a chance America can start controlling money in politics and make progress towards real democracy that serves the public interest.

But that’s the question: Will a majority stay dedicated, through years of watching politics amount to nothing? Those young people who believed Candidate Obama when he said, “Yes we can” — what will become of them? What if they conclude “No we can’t” and just stop bothering?

That’s the ultimate goal of minority rule: a discouraged majority that stops looking to political action as a way to solve its problems.

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Mandela’s Memorial Was All About Us

December 16, 2013 – 10:02 am

How do you pitch a foreign funeral to a nation of Homer Simpsons?
Manufacture America-centered controversy.

Nelson Mandela’s public memorial service was held Tuesday in a vast stadium in Johannesburg. Leaders from all over the globe attended, and several of them spoke about Mandela, his significance in history, and how his life inspired people around the world.

The mood was generally upbeat, more like a New Orleans jazz funeral or an Irish wake than the somber kind of remembrance. But still you can imagine Homer Simpson pointing his remote at the TV and announcing his judgment: “BOR-ing.” A day devoted to some dead guy on the other side of the world and the stuff he did in some other century? Where’s the drama?

Khrushchev and Kennedy

So instead American news networks made the story all about us: The big news out of Johannesburg wasn’t anything about Mandela, it was President Obama shaking hands with Raul Castro.

To me, it looked like one of those awkward running-into-your-ex’s-new-boyfriend moments you might have at a wedding reception, and Obama handled it graciously. He’s shaking hands as he makes his way to the podium and suddenly there’s Castro, so Obama just keeps shaking hands like it’s no big deal.

Nice save, Mr. O.

Except — OMG!!!! — he’s shaking hands with Raul Castro! Rev up the outrage machine. It’s, like, Chamberlain shaking hands with Hitler or something!

Mao and Nixon

For the everything-Obama-does-is-an-outrage crowd, two bizarre ideas are at work: First, that Cuba’s government is something special among dictatorships, and second, that until now American presidents have maintained a hands-that-hold-whips-shall-never-hold-mine purity standard when it comes to tyrants.

The first point is best left to comedians like Jon Stewart:

[singing] Raul Castro is not Adolf Hitler. [/singing] … Raul Castro is not even Fidel. He’s like Cuba’s Jim Belusi. … And by the way, Cuba’s not the only country with a spotty record of imprisoning people in Cuba.

Second, not only is there a long history of American leaders meeting and greeting Communist dictators — Nixon and Mao, Kennedy and Khrushchev, and Nixon even gave Brezhnev a Lincoln Town Car — but we also have a long history of supporting some of the world’s most brutal dictators: Stalin was our ally in World War II, and who can forget such friends-of-America as the Shah of Iran, the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, General Pinochet in Chile, Saddam Hussein, or even the current regime in Turkmenistan?

So the only thing outrageous here is the outrage. When it comes to tyrants, America’s hands haven’t been clean for at least a century.

The other Obama-outrage from the funeral was this picture:

So here’s Obama and British Prime Minister Cameron taking a selfie with some red-hot blonde described by The Daily Mail as “flirty” and by the New York Post as a “Danish tart”. Fox News couldn’t stop chortling. The Post decided Obama-and-the-white-chick was a front-page scandal.

Who’s the mystery vixen? Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark, a country where neither blondes nor powerful women are so rare as to make headlines. The selfie is of three world leaders, not Obama and some blonde.

I’m not sure what’s worse: The racist where-the-white-women-at angle or the sexist who’s-that-slut angle. What’s a girl gotta do to get some respect?

On Michelle’s apparently disapproving expression, Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta offered a more mundane explanation:

[It’s] the look of a person with jetlag who flew halfway around the world overnight, spent four hours at a hotel early in the morning, and then had to go to a memorial service.”

Maybe that explains Laura Bush’s similarly sour expression when her man had a similarly animated conversation with an attractive female world leader, Jordan’s Queen Rania. (Oddly, that triangle drew virtually no international media attention.)

Salon’s Roxane Gay finds a race/gender issue in the media’s focus on and interpretation of that one image of Michelle (as opposed to others where she seems to be having a good time):

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be.

Ted Cruz walked a fine line in Johannesburg. On the one hand, he wanted to appear statesmanlike on the world stage. But earlier in the week he got stung by his supporters when he tried to be gracious to Mandela on his Facebook page. So Cruz made his own Cuba moment Tuesday by walking out during Castro’s speech. Because that’s what the memorial services of great peacemakers are for: expressing your disapproval of the other mourners.

PolicyMic points out how differently the memorial might have been covered, even if you wanted an America-centric angle. The Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas all traveled together on Air Force One. Pictures suggest they got along and were even chummy. But again, where’s the drama in that? BOR-ing.

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