The Weekly Sift

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America

— the Preamble of the United States Constitution

In this week’s Sift:

• SOTU: Government as Us, Not Them. President Obama didn’t announce any big new policy agenda, but instead laid out a counter-narrative to the Tea Party’s stop-the-government rhetoric. Obama appeals to national pride by framing government as how We the People act together to do things we can’t do as individuals.
• Egypt. Whatever government comes out of the current unrest is going to be very difficult for the American media to portray accurately. That’s why I’ve started watching Al Jazeera.
• Demoting the General Welfare. Rand Paul has given us a Tea Party budget. It’s an opening salvo against the general idea that we are a nation with national interests.
• Short Notes. House Republicans redefine the rape exemption for Medicaid abortion funding. No more secret holds in the Senate. Rabbis denounce Fox. Clarence Thomas’ ethical problem. Utah gets a state firearm. A territorial turkey. And more.

President Obama’s State of the Union address (delivered Tuesday night) was a framing speech, not a policy speech. It told us not so much what the administration is going to do over the next two years, but how it is going to present its case to the American people.

As much as I’d like to hear a big policy agenda from the President, I think he made good use of the setting. The central battle of the next two years is going to be a battle of narratives. Republicans want the American people to think of government as a Them; government takes “our” money, and we may need to shut the government down to get it to stop. Democrats need to present government as an Us; in a democracy, government is how We the People do things together that we can’t do as individuals.

When Obama said “We do big things,” the “we” was America — an undivided America where the public and private sectors work together smoothly. By talking about a “Sputnik moment”, he made an analogy between our current economic challenges and the space race (in which we started out behind, but got to the Moon first anyway).

I agree with frame-guru George Lakoff: It’s a brilliant frame if he can make it stick: The space race could not have been won — or even run — by the free market. And it produced one of America’s greatest moments of national pride, the Moon landing. When government and the private sector work together, we do big things indeed.

The government-is-us-acting-together frame exposes the weakness of the conservative message, which can evoke national pride only through war. Conservatives are saying — and should be made to say publicly, again and again — that we can’t have the things other nations have. We can’t have national health care. We can’t have bullet trains. We can’t have clean, well-equipped parks or libraries or schools. We can’t take care of our old people or send our young people to college. We can’t have safe bridges or smooth highways. We can’t have clean energy.

Other nations can, but not us. We’re too poor.

That’s a losing message, particularly at a time when the rich are richer than ever. Americans can see where the money has gone. And we don’t want to be told that other nations are better than we are, that they can do things we can’t. Americans want to do big things.

If you haven’t already seen it, the best place to watch the State of the Union is on the White House web site, which has annotated the speech with appropriate images and graphs.

Then watch President Obama’s speech at the Health Action 2011 conference, where he lets his hair down a little and mocks conservative disinformation about health reform. “Granny is safe,” he pledges.

And this sign is pretty good.

None of the Republicans who responded to Obama did themselves any credit. Rep. Paul Ryan was earnest but dull; his official response was forgotten almost as soon as it was delivered. CNN conservative pundit Ed Rollins lamented: “He’s the one we should be talking about tonight, and yet we’re talking about Sarah Palin saying something very stupid.”

Rep. Michelle Bachmann, representing the Tea Party, was wild and woolly. Among other distortions, she trotted out the long-ago-debunked charge that “16,500 IRS agents [may be] in charge of policing President Obama’s health care bill.”

The biggest flop, though, was Sarah Palin, representing herself. Responding to Obama’s “Sputnik moment” quote, Palin garbled history that is well known to everyone but her:

He needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space. Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union

So the Soviets won, but that’s why they collapsed in 1991, 34 years after Sputnik? (Maybe that was when the bonds came due.) With generous interpretation, parts of that statement can make sense. (Sputnik won the race to space for the Soviets, but not what is usually called “the space race”, which we won.) But no interpretation pulls it all together into a coherent thought.

Then Palin rolled on to advocate more “Spudnut moments” — a reference to a doughnut shop. I’ll let the WaPo’s Alexandra Petri respond:

President Obama is talking about competing with the rest of the world. He’s pointing out that we need to get our act together and try to commit to education and research that will allow us to make innovative strides comparable to the ones we made after we got that wake-up call from Sputnik. And you are — rambling about bakeries with names that sound sort of similar? I guess? It’s just not a responsible comparison.

Yes, we need more Spudnut moments. We need self-sufficiency, work ethic, and delicious donuts here at home. But if we really want to get the economy back on track, we need a better-educated workforce, one that knows that the Space Race didn’t bankrupt the Soviet Union, understands syntax, and doesn’t just bloviate about bakeries.

I’m reminded of the dogs in the Pixar movie Up. Palin just suddenly yells out “Squirrel!” and is off on something else entirely.

I’ve speculated before that Sarah Palin will not run for president. Well, I think Michelle Bachmann is already running. She spoke to Iowans for Tax Relief in Des Moines on January 21, and if you watch Part I of that talk on YouTube, you’ll see a campaign stump speech. Eventually she gets around to selling her vision, but in Part I she’s selling herself — explaining her connection to Iowa, telling her family’s heroic immigration story, sprinkling in as many Iowa town and county names as she can, and in general looking more charming than I’ve ever seen her. The Iowa Caucuses are a year from Sunday, and she’ll be there.

Bachmann has taken a lot of heat for what she says in Part II (around the 9 minute mark). Anderson Cooper said she flunks history, and “that’s just not true.” But it’s actually more dangerous than that. Bachmann is in that George W. Bush region where her words, if put in their full context and parsed very generously, can be defended. But the listener almost certainly goes away with a false impression.

Here’s what caused the trouble:

And our ancestors when they arrived on these shores — just think of it — they spoke different languages, they had different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions. But unbelievably, they all bound themselves back to this tradition, this covenant that was contained in the Mayflower Compact, this covenant that we re-published in the Declaration of Independence. How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point for people-groups from all across the world! It didn’t matter the color of their skin. It didn’t matter their language. It didn’t matter their economic status. It didn’t matter whether they descended from nobility or whether they had a higher class or a lower class. It made no difference. Once you got here, we were all the same.

Now, obviously the color of your skin did matter, and even among whites the Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants were not really equal. In a generous context, though, Bachmann is talking about the ideal of America, not the practice. She mentions slavery as a “stain on our history” and then stretches the facts to claim “the very Founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Well, maybe Franklin and a couple others, but Washington and Jefferson kept their slaves, and the Founders as a whole worked tirelessly to push the question off to later generations. But the larger point Bachmann is making, that we were “self-correcting” on this issue, is more-or-less true, in the sense that no foreign power had to come in and free our slaves.

It’s a Bush-like 10% truth that easily slides into 1% truth and then into outright fantasy. Dangerous.

Breaking news isn’t something the Sift can do well, so instead I’ll point you to my favorite source for up-to-the-minute coverage of the Egyptian uprising. Sad to say, it’s not any American news organization or even the BBC — it’s Al Jazeera. My cable system doesn’t carry it, so I’ve been watching Al Jazeera live online.

In general, Egypt is a tough issue for the American media to cover clearly, because the reality over there runs perpendicular to a lot of our myths. For example, we think of ourselves as representing democracy and often (especially on the Right) think of Islam as our enemy. But in Egypt (as in many Arab countries) a corrupt dictator has been propped up for decades by America. And (as in any country with an authoritarian government and a religious tradition) many Egyptians look to religion for a moral authority higher than the tyrant, and as a source of values higher than money and power. In Poland, that religious tradition was Catholicism; in Egypt, it’s Islam. (Check out this photo of protestors praying while police stand over them.)

So to the extent that Egyptians ever get a government that truly represents them, that government will be part-secular, part-Islamist, suspicious of America, and cautiously hostile towards Israel — a little like Turkey’s government, only moreso. It’s hard to imagine American media recognizing such a government as democratic, no matter how free the elections might be.

Over here, this situation is making heads explode across the spectrum. The administration sounds unconvincing as it tries to distance itself from a former tyrannical ally without unnerving our other tyrannical allies (like the Saudis). Meanwhile, right-wingers are simultaneously claiming the uprising as evidence that Bush was right about spreading democracy in the Middle East, and saying that we have to support Mubarak. Israeli commentators are already tagging Obama as “the president who lost Egypt”.

The other feature to watch about the uprising is its pan-Arabian nature. It spread to Egypt from tiny Tunisia, and there are already demonstrations in Yemen. Places like Jordan and the Emirates have to be worried. Cairo is the traditional center of thought and learning in the Arab world, and any movement that took hold in Egypt would have strong appeal.

Right now, Americans need to educate ourselves about Egypt and similar countries, so that we’re not easily stampeded by the propaganda that will surely erupt against whatever government replaces Mubarak, assuming he falls. This 2004 article in the New Yorker seems like a good place to start. Send me links as you find them.

I am still looking for the source of the quote that goes something like “If you want to know an organization’s values, look at its budget.” Rand Paul’s newly submitted  “A Bill to cut $500,000,000,000 in spending in fiscal year 2011” is the closest thing to a Tea Party budget we have. It says a lot about Tea Party values.

The first thing to note is that Paul is cutting half a trillion out of the current fiscal year, the one that we’re already four months into. (Federal fiscal years start on October 1.) If it were to pass (unlikely), federal agencies already four months into their budgets would get  rude surprise.

The bill itself is only 12 pages, and gives no details beyond naming a piece of the government and then saying how much less money it gets. For example:

Amounts made available to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for fiscal year 2011 are reduced by $1,165,000,000.

To get any kind of explanation, you need to go to Paul’s overview document. At 37 pages, it is also terse. But there are themes: Agencies should return to their original missions, no matter how much the world has changed in the meantime. Any program that is not solving its problem should be eliminated rather than fixed or replaced, regardless of the effect on the underlying problem. And beyond defense, there is no such thing as a national interest; the states are like 50 bison that have clumped together in a herd for safety.

But sometimes you don’t get even that much justification, and the cut seems to be based on little more than an ideological assumption that waste must be in there somewhere. Take the CDC again. It’s our front line against plagues and epidemics, the folks we depend on to helicopter down in astronaut suits if SARS or ebola breaks out or drug-resistant tuberculosis gets out of hand. It has a total budget of $6.342 billion in 2011, so $1.165 billion represents a 28% cut for the final 2/3 of the year (assuming Paul’s bill could be passed immediately).

How should the CDC fulfill its mission with 28% less money? Given how disastrous a mistake could be, you might hope for some kind of expert justification, maybe a new strategy based on a medical study or two. Nope. The overview just suggests “focusing on domestic priorities rather than spending billions on overseas initiatives.” So basically, the CDC should stop worrying about plagues in other countries, and wait until they show up here. In Rand Paul’s world, that kind of thinking saves money.

There’s a lot of nostalgia in Paul’s worldview. The Department of Education should be eliminated because we didn’t have one in the first half of the 20th century, when “America ranked among the most educated population in the world,” while now “the U.S. now ranks far below other economically developed countries.” Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The National Park Service can be cut 42% by returning public lands “to the states or the private sector”.

In short, there is no national interest in things like education or infrastructure or research, and if Arizona wants to sell off the Grand Canyon (like it sold its state capitol building), that’s no more my affair than if Peru privatized Machu Picchu. It’s a state treasure, not a national treasure.

The people who promote this vision claim to get it from the Founders, but it’s really older than that. It’s the vision not of not the Constitution, but of the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution replaced. The Articles created less perfect union, a “firm league of friendship” more like NATO than a nation. Dissatisfaction with the Articles motivated founders like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to push for a constitution with broad national goals like “promote the general welfare”.

When was the last time you heard the consitution-quoters of the Tea Party talk about promoting the general welfare?

Wild turkeys, it turns out, are territorial. This one wants to drive the Postal Service eagle away.

The latest example of the IOKIYAR (It’s OK If You’re a Republican) principle: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Over five years his financial disclosure forms failed to declare nearly $700K of his wife’s income from conservative groups. It’s a crime, technically lying under oath, and it’s got people wondering if he voted on cases where he had a conflict of interest, most notably Citizens United. I’m not holding my breath until the wage of outrage comes.

400 rabbis put an ad in the Wall Street Journal calling on the Journal’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, to sanction his Fox News employee Glenn Beck for portraying Holocaust-survivor George Soros as a Holocaust-collaborator: “It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps.” More generally:

you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks

Jon Stewart also called attention to the frequent Nazi references on Fox, particularly by Beck. Meanwhile, Beck’s ratings are sagging. A year ago he often drew 3 million viewers a night, but lately he has had trouble breaking 2 million. (That’s still high compared to other cable news shows; 1 million viewers is a good night for Rachel Maddow.)

I’ve complained before about essays that get padded out to book length just because there’s a market for books. Well, now there are Kindle Singles: shorter works available for $1-3. With its typical optimism, Wired says this “saves long-form journalism”. Maybe. First let’s see if Nook and iBook follow suit.

Mother Jones explains the House Republicans’ proposed abortion bill: “If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion.” An NYT editorial lists the ways in which this bill would make it harder to find and pay for any insurance policy that covered abortion.

Nicholas Kristof tells the story of St Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix, which got stripped of its affiliation with the local Roman Catholic diocese after performing an abortion to save a woman’s life and refusing to repent for it. This was the bishop’s escalation after excommunicating a nun on the ethics board didn’t bring the hospital to heel.

The push to end the filibuster comes to nothing, but at least the Senate got rid of secret holds — a parliamentary maneuver by which a senator could block legislation or nominations without taking a public stand.

Injured pitcher Gil Meche walks away from the $12 million the Royals were contracted to pay him next year. “Making that amount of money from a team that’s already given me over $40 million… it just wasn’t the right thing to do.”

In Utah, the state bird is the California gull, the state flower is the sego lilly — and soon the state firearm will be the Browning M1911 pistol.

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The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

— J. J. Rousseau, Confessions (1770)

In this week’s Sift:

• Storming Sacramento, Austin, Albany … The same anti-government spending rhetoric that sent Tea Partiers marching against Washington also has them revolting against the “wasteful” spending of their state governments. But will the public see through the rhetoric when schools and libraries close — not just in blue California but in red Texas as well?
• Sarah Palin’s Persecution Fantasy. With references to “blood libel” and “pogroms”, conservatives paint themselves as victims of persecution comparable to Jews under the Czar. Maybe they’ve pushed it too far this time. Meanwhile, potential victims of media-inspired violence have developed a term to describe the threat they face: stochastic terrorism.
• Short Notes. Your church contributions may not make it to God. McCain states have more gun violence than Obama states. More on Second Amendment solutions. Sean Hannity claims Kuwait’s oil. An El Paso “traditional family values” organization learns the importance of legal expertise. Illegal foreclosures. And the difficult conundrums of superhero law.

Recessions hit the states with a double whammy: Just as the number of people in need of state services goes up, revenues go down. And unlike the federal government, most states have legal restrictions on deficit spending. Last year, one-time-only accounting tricks (Arizona did a $735 million sale-and-leaseback agreement with its real estate, including the state capitol) and the federal stimulus (which included $165 billion in aid to the states) masked the problem. Basically, the federal government ran the deficit the states weren’t allowed to run.

Now, as the stimulus money runs out, the economy is showing a few signs of bouncing back, but mostly for the relatively well-to-do. Even as the stock market rises into territory it hasn’t seen for years, the unemployment and poverty rates — and the consequent need for state programs — remain high.

So budget problems are hitting the states hard now. The easy cuts have already been made, but huge deficits remain. And (despite Republican rhetoric favoring the states over the federal government), the Republican victory in November means that new aid to the states isn’t going to come from Washington.

Within the states, the Tea Party denunciations of Washington have been reworded to attack Sacramento, Albany, Austin, and all the other state capitals. In state after state, a game of chicken is going on: How many of the poor and helpless have to suffer and even die, how far are we willing to cut education, how close does the state have to come to declaring bankruptcy, before new taxes can be approved?

(This game may go further than I thought. Saturday, conservative pundits Dick Morris and Eileen McGann posted a column proposing a state bankruptcy process that would allow states to break their union contracts the way that bankrupt corporations do. It’s interesting how the Right regards contracts as sacred — unless the contracts protect workers.)

Texas. Everybody talks about the budget problems in liberal states like California and New York, but things are just as bad in conservative strongholds like Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and Mississippi. Business Insider notes the Texas-sized hole in Texas’ finances — they’re looking at a $25 billion deficit in a $95 billion two-year budget — and then comments:

So why haven’t we heard more about Texas, one of the most important economies in America? Well, it’s because it doesn’t fit the script. It’s a pro-business, lean-spending, no-union state. You can’t fit it into a nice storyline, so it’s ignored.

Illinois. Friday Illinois managed to raise taxes in response to the current crisis. The income tax rate went up from 3% to 5%. Prior to the increase, Illinois was looking at a $15 billion deficit. Democratic state rep Michael Zalewski justified the tax increase like this:

Since I’ve been elected in 2008, I have voted for every cut, every reform bill and the fact is there is no more money left and we can’t pay the people we owe money to.

California. California is facing the biggest deficit, in the $20-25 billion range. New Governor Jerry Brown has put forward a budget in which

the state’s welfare program is cut in half, $1 billion is trimmed from its universities, and tens of thousands of elderly and disabled residents lose access to care at home.

On the revenue side, he wants the voters to approve the extension of temporary taxes otherwise due to expire.

California’s problems have been due as much to politics as economics. In previous years, the legislature had to pass its budget with a 2/3 supermajority, which gave the Republican minority the ability to block attempts to raise revenue, even when the Republican governor (Schwarzenegger) asked them to. Brown is aided by a newly-passed ballot initiative that lets a mere majority pass a budget.

Local governments. The clearest evidence of the depths of the education-funding problem comes from Detroit. Last Monday, the Detroit Public Schools filed a plan to close half of their schools in two years, and increase the average high school class size to 62 from 35 now. Middle school class size would increase from 35 to 47. Matt Yglesias comments:

obviously this is death spiral stuff—the more the city pares back, the more the people with means and opportunity will leave and the worse things will become.

In all these state and local governments, the debate resembles the national debate: Conservative rhetoric says that the budget is full of wasteful spending, but is careful not to identify anything specific. When cuts arrive, they are not “waste” by any means. Real services to real people are eliminated or cut back.

It will be interesting to see if people catch on when the cuts are closer to home. On the national level, keeping taxes low for the wealthy means we have the abstract problem of a budget deficit. But on the state and local level, low taxes may mean closing the local library, sending your child to an over-crowded and poorly maintained school, driving over potholes, or even watching people die for lack of medical care.

I think they will catch on. Like the children of misers, at some point Americans will start to resent living as if our country were poor, when in fact it is rich. Unlike Botswana or Bangladesh, America can afford to have smooth roads and good schools. We can afford to take care of our sick and give pensions to our elders. We can afford to have safe communities and clean, reliable transportation systems. And we can afford to pay a living wage to the public employees who provide these services. The only question is whether we can raise enough faith in ourselves and our democracy to do so.

Like most reasonable people, I was taken aback that Sarah Palin would use the term blood libel to describe the claim that heated political rhetoric from people like her makes political shootings more likely. How ridiculous, I thought, to compare criticism of Palin’s rhetoric to the outlandish claims that led to pogroms against Jews in Europe. (The Washington Times, by contrast, felt that Palin was “well within her rights to feel persecuted” and called the incident “the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.” It is, I think, a very strange kind of persecution that gives you your own TV show, pays you millions of dollars, and requires only that you submit to some toothless criticism in the media. It’s a far cry from the Jewish experience in 19th century Ukraine, or even Fiddler on the Roof.)

Having watched the video and read the text of Palin’s statement, though, I found it more boring than incendiary, so I wound up concluding that she just didn’t know what blood libel means. It’s ignorance, not bomb-throwing. Probably she used the term because it had been ricocheting around in conservative circles for several days.

Another bizarre notion in Palin’s statement (which also is widespread in conservative circles) is the idea that individual and social responsibility are mutually exclusive:

President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

It didn’t make any sense when Reagan said it, and it still doesn’t. If violent rhetoric or the prevalence of guns raises the likelihood of events like the Tucson shooting, how does that let Loughner off the hook? The Right understands this perfectly well in regard to terrorism: They can denounce the rhetoric of radical imams without letting suicide bombers off the hook. Individual and social responsibility are two different dimensions of an event, not an either-or choice.

And Palin herself says that the “blood libel” put forward by her critics “serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn.” So Palin understands how the words of her critics can cause violence, but not how hers can.

The technical term for this mindset — that the world works differently for you than for everybody else — is narcissism, but that’s too academic for the average person. If only there were a non-sexist way to say “drama queen”.

Slate’s William Saletan spins the tea-party/Muslim analogy in a different direction:

That’s what Palin believes. Each person is solely accountable for his actions. Acts of monstrous criminality “begin and end with the criminals who commit them.” It’s wrong to hold others of the same nationality, ethnicity, or religion “collectively” responsible for mass murders.

Unless, of course, you’re talking about Muslims. In that case, Palin is fine with collective blame.

How else can we account for her opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque?

“Blood libel,” as defined by The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, is historically targeted not at a country but at a religion. Palin’s campaign against any Muslim house of worship near Ground Zero, based on group blame for terrorism, fits that definition more closely than does any current accusation against the Tea Party.

There’s now a term to describe those who use the media to stir up crazy people to do their dirty work for them: stochastic terrorism. Daily Kos’ G2geek defines:

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

Palin’s crosshair graphic is not actually a good example of this (the Palin-Loughner connection is too tenuous), but Glenn Beck’s crusade against the Tides Foundation is. Hardly anyone had heard of the Tides Foundation when Beck started slandering it in May 2009. Media Matters found 29 separate shows between then and July 14, 2010 where Beck attacked Tides, demonizing it as part of some imaginary George-Soros-funded effort to take over America.

On July 18, 2010 Byron Williams was pulled over by police and opened fire on them. He was heavily armed and said he wanted to “to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation.” Only his inability to drive there without drawing police attention prevented him from having a body count like Jared Loughner’s.

As a follow-up to last week’s article on political correctness, let’s consider the would-be defenders of the white race who want you to boycott Marvel’s upcoming Thor movie because the Norse god Heimdall is being played by a black actor, the excellent Idris Elba (recently seen as the star of BBC’s “Luther”).

Where to start with these people? Did you thinkMarvel’s Thor comics had given an accurate account of Norse mythology up to now? Does a pop-culture misrepresentation of a second-tier god like Heimdall cramp your style religiously? When was the last time you worshipped Heimdall, anyway?

Fundamentally, this is another attempt to equate slights against whites with superficially similar slights against other races, and so support the idea that whites suffer persecution too. But there is no comparison. No anti-white stereotype is being supported or reinforced. No whites will be discriminated against because of some unconscious social conviction that divinity must be black. The persecution occurs entirely in fantasy.

Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander ran the numbers on shooting deaths and found no positive correlation with the number of drug users, illegal immigrants, or a lot of other alleged explanations. But they did find this:

Taking the voting patterns from the 2008 presidential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearm-related deaths were positively associated with states that voted for McCain (.66) and negatively associated with states that voted for Obama (-.66). Though this association is likely to infuriate many people, the statistics are unmistakable. Partisan affiliations alone cannot explain them; most likely they stem from two broader, underlying factors – the economic and employment makeup of the states and their policies toward guns and gun ownership.

As I’ve explained many times in the Sift, correlation is not the same as cause-and-effect. So it would be irrational to jump to the conclusion that we could save lives by getting more states to vote Democratic in 2012. It seems worth a try, though.

The new head of the Republican National Committee is Reince Priebus. I just heard someone describe him as “a name straight out of Hogwarts”. As Sharoney observed, the consonants in his name spell out RNC PR BS.

As she so often does, Digby avoids the distractions and gets to the important point:

The real problem, in my view, is that there is a subset of Americans who believe that government is illegitimate if their chosen leaders aren’t elected. They simply don’t believe in democracy.

That’s what I see in all this talk about “Second Amendment solutions“. Yes, at least some of the Founders did want the people to retain the means of revolution if democracy failed. But the failing they had in mind is what you see in faux-democratic countries like Egypt or Iran, where the government can close opposition newspapers, arrest opposition candidates, and stuff the ballot box when things get tense for them.

But Tea Party folks started talking about assassination and armed insurrection just because Republicans lost and Democrats started implementing the platform they ran on. The electoral system was working fine, it just got the “wrong” answer. Resorting to guns in that situation is the exact opposite of what the Founders had in mind.

Shepard Fairey’s “Second Amendment Solutions” poster says: “It’s not the bullet with my name on it that worries me. It’s the one that says ‘to whom it may concern’.”

According to Sean Hannity, Kuwait and Iraq should be paying us for their liberation by providing cheap energy. And if they don’t see it that way,

We have every right to go in there and, frankly, take all their oil.

Apparently we just loaned these countries their freedom, and if they miss a payment we can foreclose.

Once in a while, the Religious Right gets burned by its disdain for intelligence and expertise. Take El Paso, for example. An anti-gay group called El Paso for Traditional Family Values wanted to make sure that same-sex partners of city employees couldn’t get benefits, so they got voters to pass a ballot initiative saying so — or so they thought. Local station KVIA reports:

The ordinance drafted by EPFTFV asked voters to ‘endorse traditional family values’ by extending health insurance only to city employees, their spouses and dependent children. That left out a lot of people the city already covered, including elected officials, retirees, grandchildren, and affiliated contractors – those are agencies formed by City Council, like the Public Service Board and the Transportation Board. …

The city maintains it must implement the ordinance using its plain language, which excludes hundreds of people. City Rep. Steve Ortega and Mayor John Cook have said they told EPFTFV leaders to hire an attorney to draft the ordinance. The organization did not do that.

Oops.

A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction that keeps the law from taking effect until he can rule on a suit challenging its constitutionality.  Among other things, plaintiffs are charging that the law is too vague to be enforceable:

The Judge asked all three lawyers to provide a legal definition of ‘traditional family values’ that could be found in state or federal law, statute or jurisprudence. None of them could.

Damn those meddling federal judges and their definitions and constitutions and other legalistic claptrap. Can’t they just let the Holy Spirit speak through them?

TPM recalls some of the more egregious recent political rhetoric suggesting violence or using violent metaphors.

Salon’s Glenn LaFantasie points out that, although we always treat political shootings as one-of-a-kind exceptions to our democratic process, in fact they are part of a longstanding pattern in our politics.

American political violence is a direct legacy of the American Revolution, for the patriots’ victory in that conflict proved to the American people that violence could achieve a positive end: independence and the creation of a new nation. It is a troubling, but inescapable, bequest that stems from the fact that our nation was born in violence, and it derives from the reality that violence has ever since become not only the device of criminals, but also of government and those who disagree with the government.

The NYT reports:

in the grand Venn diagram of life, there appears to be substantial overlap between lawyers and the people Mr. Daily lovingly refers to as “comic book nerds.”

The result is a blog. Law and the Multiverse: Superheroes, supervillains, and the law.

I mean, there are important issues to work out: How much responsibility do you have for the damage done by your super-powered minor child?What kind of retirement plan does an immortal need? Is there any way Bruce Wayne could openly fund Batman without becoming legally responsible for the damage he does? Is mind control a valid criminal defense?

Don’t wait until a radioactive spider bites you and it’s too late. Learn your rights now.

Tea Partiers aren’t racists, of course. But when they get into office in places like Raleigh, North Carolina their first acts include undoing the longstanding school-desegregation plan, and replacing it with … well, nothing really. Maybe separate-but-equal will work this time around.

It should be no great surprise that the same bankers who loaned money to people who had no hope of paying it back also failed to handle the mortgage paperwork correctly. The result is that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court now holds that huge numbers of foreclosures were illegal.

The Boston Globe’s Paul McMorrow reports on the implications:

I took a random sample of 30 foreclosure deeds from Chelsea (one of the cities hit hardest by foreclosures) since the beginning of 2006. Of those 30 foreclosure cases, 10 had paperwork on file with the Registry of Deeds that raised the sort of chain-of-custody concerns at the heart of the Ibanez decision. In one case, no mortgage was on file with the registry. Another showed no paperwork assigning the note to a mortgage servicer. In other cases, mortgage originators didn’t sign off on documents transferring the notes into mortgage pools, or transfer paperwork was filed after a foreclosure occurred. All of the properties have since been re-sold.

What could possibly go wrong?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.

— — Benjamin Barber, Consumed (2007)

all the Sift quotes of 2010 are collected here

This is the 49th and last Sift of 2010. Time to look back at where we’ve been.

In this year’s Sifts:

• The Theme of the Year: Concentration of Wealth. I never set out to explore a theme over the course of a year, but it happens on its own. This year, a number of Sfits ended up being about the concentration of wealth — that it’s happening, how it’s happening, and what problems it’s causing.
• Update on Last Year’s Theme: Corporatism. The battle between corporations and humans continued this year. The Citizens United decision helped make 2010 a good year to be a corporation.
• Secondary theme: Propaganda. By now I expect Sift readers to know that large swaths of the population believe things that are flat-out false. But why do they believe them? How do they believe them? I kept coming back to those questions all year long.
• The Sifted Books of 2010. There were a lot of them this year. All the links are collected here.
• Short Notes. The Sift’s biggest hit in 2010. My biggest mistake. And a couple of current notes: Obama moves towards embracing indefinite detention, a consequence of DADT repeal crosses my FaceBook news feed, and Barney Frank runs rings around a hostile reporter.

In 2010 there were two economies. If you were a Wall Street banker, happy days were here again. Even if you were just an investor, things were pretty good — the Dow is up nearly 1000 points this year, almost 10%. But if you were unemployed, it was a different story. Close to half of the unemployed — 6.3 million of them — have been out of work for more than 6 months.

That’s just the most recent step in a journey America has been on since late in the Carter administration: The rich have been getting richer, but everyone else has been working harder and producing more for little extra money — and sometimes less. The so-called “Bush boom” was the first time since the Depression that median household income dropped over a complete business cycle.

A lot of  people, including me, have talking about that for years. But in September a bunch of recent data got popularized in Timothy Noah’s series The Great Divergence on Slate and in the newly published Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.

The interesting point in this data is that the “vanishing middle class” phenomenon is only the part of the problem most of us are in a position to see. If you have the data, you realize that the super-rich are pulling away from everyone else, not just from the poor. If the world were a village of 1000 people, one guy would have made 1/8th of the money in 2008, nearly five times the share he got in 1973. (Increasingly that guy — or the super-rich class he represents — lives in a different world from the rest of us, as Robert Frank chronicled in Richistan.)

When you realize that hyper-concentration of wealth is the essence of the phenomenon, then most of the standard explanations fall away: It’s not global competition or education or immigration or automation, because none of that separates the top tenth of a percent from the top percent. Competition from illegal aliens isn’t preventing millionaires from keeping up with billionaires.

Hacker and Pierson lay the blame at the feet of the government: Republican and Democratic administrations alike have favored capital over labor, finance over industry, corporations over consumers, lenders over borrowers, fine-print-writers over the naive — in short, the very rich over everybody else.

Thomas Geoghagen’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be that way. Europe is subject to all the same economic winds we are, but countries like Germany and France and Sweden have built much more egalitarian societies, which Geoghagen argues are better places for ordinary people to live.

Typically, concentration-of-wealth is argued as a moral issue: Why should some people be allowed to waste the world’s resources on ridiculous luxury while others can’t get necessities? (This is the point of view of The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson. She tells the stories of middle-managers who — recognizing the injustice of it all — break or otherwise circumvent the rules to make life livable for the working poor. Conservatives are well defended against this moral argument, as I explain in How to Speak Conservative: Class Warfare.)

But Robert Reich’s Aftershock argues that concentrated wealth is bad in purely economic terms: In a healthy economy, mass production and mass consumption go together; money cycles naturally because people who make stuff can afford to buy stuff. (Similar ideas are in Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal.)

But when wealth gets too concentrated, money piles up in the accounts of people who don’t spend it. At first they might invest it in new production, which is good, but even that slows down once it becomes clear that demand isn’t keeping up. (Why expand a factory if you can’t sell what it’s making now?) Instead, the surplus of the rich gets drawn into speculative bubbles, as they look for investments that don’t depend on increased consumption. (I explain what’s wrong with the contrary view — that rich people create jobs — in Where Jobs Come From. These days, it’s customers who create jobs, not investors.)

That low-demand, underemployed, bubble-driven economy is typical of both the last decade and the 1920s, the previous time wealth was over-concentrated. The 20s ended in the Great Depression, and the “Bush boom” nearly had the same result. Unless we can start de-concentrating wealth — as happened accidentally due to World War II — Reich makes the case that future business cycles will be similar: speculative bubbles followed by collapse.

Finally, we get to the moral case libertarians make for capitalism and the so-called free market: that the market gives people what they deserve, and that changing the market result is some form of theft. The best refutation of this idea is the book Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, which I reviewed in April.

Alperovitz and Daly start with the question of why today’s economy is so much more productive than, say, America in 1800. It seems unlikely that the billionaires of today are hundreds of times harder working or smarter than the businessmen of 1800. The more sensible explanation is that society as a whole is benefitting from the accumulation of knowledge and social capital. The inventions of people alive today make a difference, but a much bigger difference is that we’ve gotten better at using things invented or discovered generations ago. (For example, we make really good wheels and fires these days.)

In short, our advantage in productivity is largely a collective inheritance from our ancestors, so diffuse that it’s not even attributable to individual bloodlines. What happens under capitalism, though, is that our collective inheritance benefits a relatively small number of people. What looks like individual earning is largely a usurpation of an inheritance that rightfully ought to belong to everybody. (We should all be getting our share of royalties on the Wheel. I made a similar argument last year in a talk called Who Owns the World?)

Another financial theme: I looked at a number of explanations of how the real-estate bubble grew and then popped, most notably The Big Short by Michael Lewis and ECONned by Yves Smith.

In April, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka pulled a bunch of these themes together in a talk at the Kennedy School of Government.

Last December was the first time I noticed an annual theme in the Weekly Sift. Over the course of 2009, I had become more and more radicalized about the opposition between corporations and human beings.

2010 started with the Citizens United decision, which I characterized as Judicial Activism: The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights. That week I was also inspired to write The Book of Corporation, a re-telling of Genesis in which God creates the Eden Corporation, which in turn hires the Serpent as its CEO. Eventually the Babel Project succeeds and God is ousted by the Serpent.

In the Citizens United decision, the Court’s conservative majority anticipated that transparency would allow voters to evaluate the sources of campaign advertising, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Republicans managed to block the DISCLOSE Act in the Senate. Consequently, the fall elections saw a flood of anonymous money, nearly all of it spent on negative ads against Democrats. I covered this in Quotations of Chairman Anonymous.

The other big corporate/human conflict story of the year was the West Virginia mine disaster. Having reviewed Doubt is Their Product last year (followed by Merchants of Doubt this year), I saw the miners’ deaths differently than the mainstream media:

This is the current level of corporate ethics: If they can make money by killing their workers or customers, they will. It’s not just a few bad apples; it’s standard operating procedure. … Current law is more concerned with protecting the mine owners from frivolous claims than protecting the lives of miners.

That’s still true. A new mine safety bill was proposed after the miners’ deaths, but Republicans managed to defeat it.

Another place where corporate lobbying worked against the public interest this year was with regard to net neutrality:

The point here is to create many new choke-points where toll booths can be set up. That — and not innovation and competition — is how big corporations make big money.

I finally summed up my picture of corporations a few weeks ago in Corporations are Sociopaths. I don’t intend that to be a rhetorical insult; I propose it as a diagnosis. Like sociopaths, corporations can be useful and entertaining if you meet them in circumstances where they can’t benefit by harming you. But if you look at the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy, they correspond to traits of corporate governance.

In a way, propaganda is always a theme of the Sift. Nearly every week I’m pointing out some widely publicized or widely believed “facts” that have no basis in reality: that the stimulus bill gave favorable treatment to districts represented by Democrats, for example, or that Obama quadrupled the deficit Bush left him. Occasionally I do a whole set of Disinformation Watch notes to list false things currently passing for truth.

But (having noticed how often new fake facts appear to replace the ones we manage to knock down) this year I tried to delve deeper into the mechanisms of the propaganda that surrounds us. Who believes it? Why? Who promotes it? How? And what are the false narratives that support and are supported by all these fake facts?

Part of the mechanism of propaganda is the cooperation of the media, or at least its submission. That was the theme of Tortured Coverage: A Harvard study documented how major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post stopped calling waterboarding torture when the Bush administration told them not to. The term became “contentious” rather than “objective” because the administration chose to contend against it.

Another level of mechanism is the network of right-wing think tanks and institutes that have been established by corporate and billionaire money. It is an entire system of apparent “experts” whose connections to their sponsors are rarely traced by the mainstream media, but whose opinions always fall in line with the interests of their sponsors. (This was the mechanism of Propaganda Lesson, in which the bogus scandal about stimulus funding was the result of “research” done by a “scholar” at the Manhattan Institute, funded predominantly by the billionaire Koch brothers.)

Similarly, large-scale corporate and billionaire money funded the Tea Party movement, but funded it through mechanisms that allowed the mainstream media to describe the movement as “grass roots”. In this way, disgruntled McCain voters who had never liked Obama were put forward as “independents” who had been “shocked” into opposition by the “radical” Obama administration. (What Money Buys)

The ultimate conservative infrastructure is the right-wing media, epitomized by Fox News, but embracing talk radio, newspapers like the Washington Times, and other outlets. This media empire has reached the point where Senate candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada could ignore the mainstream media entirely, refusing to answer any questions not posed by sympathetic voices. Fortunately, no major candidate who adopted such a strategy won a competitive race this year. But if Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012, we may see this strategy tested on a national scale. (The Private Campaign)

At the narrative level, I looked at the image of “government spending” which is always “out of control” and “wasteful”. This narrative is so well established by now that no facts are needed to support it. And so in the fall campaign right-wing candidates were able to run on a “cut spending” message without identifying any actual spending cuts other than the most trivial. They were pledged to cut “waste”, which the narrative tells us is everywhere. In an article titled simply Spending, I outlined how the supposedly “untouchable” parts of the budget were already enough to have caused a deficit in 2010.

In The Thing Behind the Thing I outlined three sets of largely unconscious assumptions underlying Tea Party rhetoric: that the authority of the Law comes in some way from God or Nature rather than from a social contract; that the punishment of transgressions is a good thing in and of itself, not requiring any justification in terms of its results; and that “the People” (as in “the People need to take this country back”) are straight white Christians.

Propaganda Lessons from the Religious Right was an attempt to get at some of the deep assumptions that make outlandish conspiracy theories believable to those on the religious Right: Belief in a Devil makes it unnecessary to provide a motive for the conspiracy, because it can literally be “demonized”. (How else to explain those terrorists who “hate progress and freedom and choice and culture and music and laughter”?) Also, a template like “reverse discrimination” can be promoted over decades, so that when an individual issue is identified as reverse discrimination, the pieces of the template snap into place without needing evidence to establish them. The lesson is that good framing doesn’t just happen because you coin a clever slogan. Templates of thought can take decades to build up.

Why Democrats Are Always on Defense makes a similar point in a different way. Here the phenomenon to be explained is: Democrats think they must “move to the Right” when they lose or fear losing, while Republicans never have to move to the Left, no matter how badly they get beaten. The piece is a re-introduction of George Lakoff’s notion of frames, and explains how a poll-driven approach to an issue can change the poll it is based on. (When liberals take what polls say is a “centrist” position, they can shift the public debate to the Right, moving the center away from the position they just took.)

Finally, last week I took a look at one of the deep conservative frames: class warfare. The phrase evokes an entire mythology on the Right, which liberals who argue against it are largely unaware of.

I went wild reviewing books this year: 16 of them in all. Some have already been mentioned in the previous sections: Aftershock by Robert Reich, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghagan, Winner-Take-All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, ECONned by Yves Smith, The Big Short by Michael Lewis, Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Richistan by Robert Frank, The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson, and Merchants of Doubt by David Michaels.

Other Sifted books of 2010 were:

Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich. Surprisingly, this is the only military or foreign-policy book that I reviewed in 2010. Bacevich is a retired colonel who has begun to doubt the necessity or wisdom of America policing the world. This book retells American military history since World War II in an attempt to explain how perpetual war became acceptable to the public, in spite of the fact that our wars seldom proceed as expected or achieve what was desired.

The Living Constitution by David Strauss. Strauss explains the common-law method of interpreting the Constitution, and presents it as a practical alternative to the better-known-but-impractical theory of originalism. At least we don’t have to try to imagine what the Founders would have thought about the Internet.

Democracy, Inc. by Sheldon Wolin. Wolin outlines what he calls “managed democracy”, in which the people don’t actually rule, but only ratify the decisions of their leaders.

The Long Descent by John Michael Greer. Greer discusses the end of civilization as we know it and stays calm about it. How exactly does the trip to Hell in a handbasket go? And what should you do when you get there?

Methland by Nick Reding. Reding interprets the crystal meth problem as a symptom of larger problems: the collapse of the social contract and the inability of government to do sensible things that would interfere with corporate profits. The result is a threat to the survival of small towns in America.

Storms of My Grandchildren by James Hansen. A NASA climate historian explains why global warming is even more serious than most people think.

The Sift article that made the biggest splash this year was My Reservations about the Market Economy. I used Open Table, a web site for making restaurant reservations, as an example of how the market economy rewards gatekeepers, not producers.

A regular Sift reader posted a link on Reddit, which for some reason took off. (Go thou and do likewise.) The Sift got 5000 hits that week (rather than a more normal 200-400).

My biggest mistake in 2010 was in refusing to believe for most of the year that the generic-ballot polls showing a Republican landslide in the House would predict the election. In the Senate, things turned out more-or-less as I expected: Republicans gained, but didn’t win the Senate, because the crazy candidates they nominated (Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell) couldn’t live up to the public’s image of a “generic Republican”.

Many House battles, on the other hand, never got beyond the generic race, and Democrats were unable to make hay out of the wild positions the Republicans were taking or had taken. But the main thing my crystal ball failed to pick up was that the Democrats would completely refuse to defend their actions. I expected a real debate about the health-care law, and pre-election votes that would tie the Republicans to unpopular pro-wealth positions. None of that happened.

In current news: According to Pro Publica, the Obama administration is drawing up an executive order that will formalize a process of indefinite detention for suspected terrorists.

I was against this when W wanted to do it, and I’m against it now. No matter how conscientious an executive-branch process you set up, everybody with any power in it takes orders from the President. You can’t deprive somebody of liberty forever one the say-so of one guy.

A lot of the claims people make about “the Constitution” are partisan. (Just about all the Tea Party folks, for example, started worrying about the Constitution on Inauguration Day, some time around noon.) But this is a real constitutional issue, and a good test of whether somebody really cares about the Constitution. You can’t seriously worry about whether the Constitution allows Congress to make you eat your vegetables and not worry about whether it allows the President to lock you up and throw away the key.

It was one of those innocuous things that come across my FaceBook news feed all the time. One of my friends updated her status to say she’s in a relationship. One of my friends in the Navy.

Oh.

And speaking of the DADT repeal, Barney Frank totally eats the lunch of a reporter from the right-wing CNS network when he springs a gotcha question about gay and straight soldiers showering together.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image.

— Senator J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (1966)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Sift Bookshelf: Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich. Why is it so hard to stop policing the world?
• Touch Somebody Else’s Junk. Last week produced a lot of venting about the TSA’s invasive scans and searches, but few good ideas. The worst idea of all is that we could avoid all this by profiling.
• Hope and Denial. A psychological study proves something we should have intuited: When the news sounds too grim, a lot of people just deny it.
• Short Notes. An extra helping of short notes this week. Don’t miss the video of the one-wing plane landing.

Every political discussion these days seems to center on the long-term budget deficit and what we can do to narrow it. We talk about raising the retirement age or privatizing Medicare and all sorts of other benefit-restricting changes. But one idea never seems to come up, or when it does come up it quickly gets dismissed: We could stop policing the world.

The cost of policing the world shows up in two ways: First, year-in year-out we spend more on defense than any conceivable coalition of enemies. (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates our military spending, including ongoing wars, at 46.5% of the world total.) That’s because we have to be prepared to intervene anywhere that evil might raise its head. We have to have military bases everywhere, and weapons and soldiers we could send to those bases at a moment’s notice.

Second, we are fighting more-or-less constant wars, with no end in sight. Our combat mission in Iraq is supposedly over, but we still lose a few soldiers every month, and the country still isn’t safe enough for its two million refuges to come home. If things deteriorate we might wind up sending troops back.

In Afghanistan our coalition regularly loses 50-75 soldiers a month. And no corner has been turned yet. The number of coalition deaths has gone up every year since 2003. Now we’re talking about 2014 as a date for ending the war, but even that seems optimistic.

Put together, the USA Today estimated in May that the two wars were costing $12.2 billion a month. In addition, we are regularly blowing things up in Pakistan, where we are allegedly not at war. Sometimes we also blow things up in Yemen. Some people want us to attack Iran. Near term, it’s more likely that we’ll be fighting in one of those countries than that we’ll get out of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Unlike entitlement programs, we have no way of predicting future military expenses. So we can talk rationally about when Medicare will go bankrupt, but not when our military commitments will become unsustainable.

Andrew Bachevich’s recent book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, examines how we got here and why it is so hard even to discuss backing away. It’s a history lesson that starts after World War II and goes to the present.

I found two things about this book striking: First, how consistent our military policy has been, no matter how our elections turn out. (I remember a joke from the 60s: “They told me that if I voted for Goldwater we’d soon have half a million troops in Vietnam. Well, I did, and we do.”) Administrations change, circumstances change, enemies change, but the need to police the world goes on.

Why? The answer is pretty simple: Corporations make money off of it and pundits, politicians, and bureaucrats make their careers. Seen any pacifist talk show hosts lately?

Second, permanent war is a post-911 thing. It’s easy to forget that. Every administration in my lifetime has fought somewhere, but the American people have never before accepted war as a way of life. We just had an election while two wars were ongoing, and frustration at the endlessness of them was not an issue. Hawks didn’t demand escalating to speed up victory; doves didn’t call for sudden withdrawal. It just wasn’t a big deal.

That’s new.

Bacevich calls for returning to a pre-1941 view of America’s role in the world. We should be an example of freedom and democracy, not the guarantor of it. He admiringly quotes John Quincy Adams from 1821:

[The United States] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

This week a great deal of ink was spilled in response to the new TSA full-body scanners and the opt-out pat-down that would be sexual assault if you hadn’t consented in order to get where you’re going. A lot of it was simple venting — like the guy who protested “Don’t touch my junk!” — and provided little insight to the issues involved. Let me see if I can assemble the worthwhile ideas.

First, this is all a response to the underwear bomber who failed to do anything more than burn his own genitalia last Christmas. But by smuggling PETN explosive onto a plane in his underwear, he did point out a hole in airline security: PETN is plastic rather than metallic, so the metal-detectors didn’t pick it up.

Ridiculous as that incident was, it pointed out a plausible avenue of attack if more competent suicide bombers could be found. (The problem with the whole suicide-bombing strategy is personnel. You’re always relying on somebody who’s never done this before.) To avert future PETN attacks, TSA decided it needed either a scanner that could find hidden bags of fluid, or it needed to check people for strange bulges in their underwear (as in the cucumber scene from This is Spinal Tap).

So the scans make sense from some narrow airline-security perspective: Somebody told TSA to defend against this threat, and the intrusive scans and searches are the most obvious way to fulfill that mission. It’s easy to imagine the outcry if a PETN explosion brought down a plane a year after it had been demonstrated that such an attack was possible.

Whether the scans make sense from a broader anti-terrorism perspective is more debatable. If you see an airliner bomb just as a way to kill 300 innocent people rather than an end in itself, you recognize that there are a lot of ways to kill innocent people in an open society like the United States. (You could blow yourself up in a mall food court on Black Friday, or even in the densely packed lines of people waiting to go through airport security.) There’s no point taking extreme measures to guard one door to mayhem if you leave the others wide open.

In short, from this point of view life in an open society is inherently risky. It’s not clear why airports should be a little chunk of police state in the middle of an otherwise free country.

There’s a legitimate debate to be had between those two views. But there’s a third POV out there that is just dangerous. Charles Krauthammer writes:

The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling – when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known.

It is undoubtedly silly to search 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds. But if word got out that we had a “narrow, concrete” profile of terrorists, Al Qaeda could start a worldwide search for out-of-profile sympathizers. Somewhere there is an 80-year-old with nothing to lose, or an 8-year-old that somebody thinks is expendable.

But an even more serious problem with the “universally known” profile is that it conveniently exempts people like me and Charles Krauthammer. (I can imagine Krauthammer’s reaction if he were pulled out of a line because someone thought Jews were suspect.) It’s way too easy to give away somebody else’s rights.

This is one of the many problems caused by the open-ended nature of the War on Terror. If a serial killer who looked like me had just escaped from a nearby prison, I could live with the indignity and inconvenience of constant suspicion for a week or two until they caught him. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re talking about permanently treating certain kinds of people differently. And once we’ve established that innocent people who fit a certain description permanently have fewer rights than the rest of us, where does that stop?

Where to draw the line between security and convenience is a question best decided by an informed public — a public that has to submit to the inconveniences it requires in the name of security. If I’m not willing to submit to a full-body scan or an invasive grope, what right do I have to demand it of someone else?

I wonder why Amtrak isn’t making hay out of this. They’ve poked at the inconvenience of plane travel in the past. Why not hit it harder now?

A new study by two Berkeley psychologists is apparently about people’s attitudes towards global warming, but I think it speaks to something much deeper that liberals need to bear in mind as they craft their messages. Feinberg and Willer are checking this hypothesis:

information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable. Individuals overcome this threat by denying or discounting the existence of global warming, ultimately resulting in decreased willingness to counteract climate change.

The researchers screened participants to identify people who have what they called “just world beliefs” — the idea that the world is fundamentally fair and predictable. Then they split the group in two and exposed each half to a different article about global warming. The two articles had the same first four paragraphs predicting the dire consequences to future (i.e. innocent) generations if we change nothing. But one group saw an article with an optimistic ending, emphasizing what we could do to avert these disasters, while the second saw a pessimistic ending, leaving little hope that change would be possible or effective.

As you might expect, the people who saw the optimistic message came away with a more optimistic attitude towards combatting global warming than the people who saw the pessimistic message. But here’s what’s interesting: The optimistic-message group had its belief in global warming itself increase after reading the article, while the pessimistic-message group grew more skeptical about global warming.

In other words, confronted with a message that undermined their belief in the world’s underlying justice (that innocent future generations will suffer and there’s nothing to be done about it), participants discounted the whole issue. It’s just not happening.

The liberal message in general says that the economic system and global power structure is unjust and needs to change. But if we stop there, or worse, if we imply that the Powers That Be are too powerful to challenge, a lot of people will simply decide to believe another set of facts. They won’t believe that Americans are dying for lack of health insurance, or that people desperately looking for jobs aren’t finding them, or that innocent people got sucked into Guantanamo and now can’t get out.

That’s why Obama had to run on themes of hope and “Yes we can.” Because if nothing can be done, then why disturb yourself by learning about the world’s injustices?

An amazing one-minute video of a stunt pilot whose maneuver turned into a bigger stunt than he planned.

Cognitive dissonance watch: If you’re worried that you’re going to leave your grandchildren a trashed planet, you’re an alarmist. If you’re worried that you’re going to leave them a pile of federal debt, you’re a serious person. Grist’s David Roberts explains the actual difference:

deficit concern is being driven by the wealthy, to secure their privileges. Climate change will affect everyone, but its worst effects will fall on the marginalized, poor, and dispossessed, and as a result, it’s being ignored and minimalized.

Like so many pieces of right-wing mythology, the account Limbaugh, Beck, et al give of Thanksgiving is not true.

For years one common complaint about the Left was that we made everything political. You couldn’t tell a joke or use common English without somebody dragging politics into it. Well, Dancing With the Stars was political this year, and we had nothing to do with it.

An Italian lingerie company has started its own version of Cash for Clunkers.

Now that the Republicans have successfully blocked a cap-and-trade law, the battle shifts to the EPA and the extent to which it can act without further authorization from Congress. Which means: You can expect an across-the-board attack on the EPA as an evil corrupt Marxist agency.

Grist examines one opening salvo, and finds that the Wall Street Journal is lying through its teeth.

I seem to be on a Grist binge. Well, this is Grist’s response to the James Fallows piece on clean coal that I linked to a couple weeks ago. The Grist-gist is that the content of Fallows’ article is as well-thought-out as Fallows’ stuff usually is. But the existence of Fallows’ article gives aid and comfort to the wrong people:

If “clean coal” development isn’t happening in the U.S., it’s not because DFHs are against it, it’s because nothing is happening in the U.S. A piece focused on that corrupt, criminal inaction might rattle a few cages. A piece reassuring Big Coal and its many backers that they’ll always be in the driver’s seat won’t.

[DFH is a standard pejorative or ironic acronym for left-wing environmentalists.]

A 1999 study showed that medical mistakes in the US caused about 100K deaths and a million injuries a year. A new study of hospitals in North Carolina shows that nothing has changed:

About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable. Most of the problems were temporary and treatable, but some were serious, and a few — 2.4 percent — caused or contributed to a patient’s death, the study found.

The findings were a disappointment but not a surprise, Dr. Landrigan said. Many of the problems were caused by the hospitals’ failure to use measures that had been proved to avert mistakes and to prevent infections from devices like urinary catheters, ventilators and lines inserted into veins and arteries.

This is part of our overall “amenable mortality” problem — the number of Americans who die because we take bad care of each other. The French do much better. (Actually just about everybody does much better, but the French are particularly good.) We could imitate them, but that would be socialism and we are a freedom-loving capitalist country. “Give me liberty or give me death” — you didn’t realize how literal that was, did you?

The New Yorker’s George Packer reads President Bush’s memoir so that I don’t have to. “Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages,” he reports, “are not self-serving.”

For Bush, making decisions is an identity question: Who am I? The answer turns Presidential decisions into foregone conclusions: I am someone who believes in the dignity of life, I am the protector of the American people, I am a loyal boss, I am a good man who cares about other people, I am the calcium in the backbone. This sense of conviction made Bush a better candidate than the two Democrats he was fortunate to have as opponents in his Presidential campaigns. But real decisions, which demand the weighing of compelling contrary arguments and often present a choice between bad options, were psychologically intolerable to the Decider. They confused the identity question.

This isn’t just Bush, it’s a whole segment of the electorate. An awful lot of the populist criticism of Obama is phrased in terms of what he is rather than anything he has done or is trying to do. (Here’s a clip of Rachel Maddow talking to Joe Miller supporters on the street in Alaska. The conversation turns to Attorney General Eric Holder, who they know is “anti-gun”. But they have no idea what anti-gun thing he is supposed to have done.) Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a foreigner, a Muslim. He’s anti-American. What he does is almost an afterthought compared to what they think he is.

You don’t usually think of concrete as a high-tech material, but that could change. Cracks in concrete actually start at the molecular level. (The article says subatomic, but I doubt that.) Adding carbon nanotubes to the usual mixture fills invisible holes to make highways that could last 100 years instead of 20.

Another concrete innovation is a bacteria that colonizes tiny cracks and produces a glue that hardens. Presto! Self-healing buildings.

The world uses so much concrete that any improvement in it is a big deal. One source in the second article says that concrete production accounts for 5% of global carbon emissions.

Seneca Doane has the right phrases for talking about the Bush tax cuts: Democrats want to extend the cuts for the first $250,000 of a family’s income. Republicans want extra tax cuts for people who make more than that.

Extra — that’s the key word.

A jury of his peers found Tom DeLay guilty of money laundering. Predictably, DeLay used the familiar conservative line about “criminalization of politics” to describe the verdict.

“Criminalization of politics” goes back to the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, and it means that liberals prosecute conservatives for doing things that are “just politics”. In truth, though, no American has ever been convicted of being a conservative. Every person convicted in such cases — like Scooter Libby in 2007 — is convicted of violating an actual law. The indictment cites a law, the prosecution assembles evidence that the law was broken, and the jury unanimously declares itself convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.

What “criminalization of politics” ought to mean, what it could more accurately refer to, is that politicians often pursue politics through criminal means like money laundering or obstructing justice. Occasionally they get caught, as DeLay was.

Just in time for Christmas shoppers, the NYT announces its 100 notable books of 2010.

In addition to those, let me plug a little-noted novel of 2008: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. I’ve had a hard time figuring out who to recommend it to, because (as one reviewer says) it “cuts across genre and expectation lines in the best possible way.” Ostensibly a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, it combines some authentically good SF ideas about matter and identity with social insight, an outrageous sense of humor, and a very non-SF writing style. (Think Neal Stephenson).

The pioneers of science fiction (Wells, Verne, Asimov, Heinlein, et al) had fascinating ideas, but generally pedestrian writing styles. Harkaway also has fascinating ideas, but (like Stephenson) he clearly relishes words and all the wonderful ways they can be put together into sentences and paragraphs and scenes.

Times are hard — unless you’re a corporation. Corporate profits set a record last quarter. I’m sure they’ll be using that money to create jobs any day now. (That was sarcasm.) Think how many jobs they’d create if Obama weren’t so anti-business, or if the corporate income tax were lower.

One of the most publicized of the global-warming deniers is Lord Christopher Monckton, who isn’t any kind of scientist, but is a viscount — which must mean something, I guess. In this audio-and-slide presentation, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota goes through Monckton’s presentation slide-by-slide and debunks his claims.

The typical sequence is: Monckton makes a claim and mentions some scientific paper as evidence. Abraham explains that Monckton is either misinterpreting or just making something up. Abraham writes to the authors of the Monckton-quoted paper, who agree with Abraham. It happens over and over and over.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

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As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth … to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery. Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of the currently produced wealth. … In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped. — Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve 1934-1948

In this week’s Sift:

• The Deficit Shell Game. For years we’ve been borrowing money to give tax cuts to the rich. Now the chairs of the  Deficit Reduction Panel are delivering the bill to the middle class.
• The Sift Bookshelf: Aftershock by Robert Reich. A skewed distribution of wealth isn’t just unfair, it’s bad for the economy.
• Political Notes. I don’t have a Big Theory about the meaning of the midterm elections. But I do know a few lesser things.
• Short Notes. Maddow interviews Stewart. Don’t get leukemia in Texas. Scientists discover new reptiles in restaurants. The Chinese are serious about clean coal. Why Glenn Beck is not (quite) an anti-Semite. What comic books can tell us about religion. And more.

Suppose a major political party went to voters with this message: “We’re going shrink every program that the middle class and the poor depend on: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and so on. And with the money saved from those cuts, we’ll give big tax cuts to the rich.”

It would never fly. Rich people would support it, of course, and the party might get as much as 30-40% of the vote if they successfully demonized their opponents. But the bald message that the rich should have more and everyone else less has never been popular.

But here’s a funny thing: If you split the proposal by putting the word deficit in the middle, and if you’re careful not to discuss the two halves of your program in the same conversation, people go for it.

In Step 1, you promote tax cuts that throw a few pennies to everyone, but are focused on the rich. At this point in the process you argue that taxes are bad, because the people who earn money should get to keep it. You paint the Government as a huge black hole that eats up money without anything ever coming out. If pressed, you pledge to cut “spending” — that amorphous mass of “waste” that could go away without hurting anybody.

Then, after you get your tax cuts passed, you come back a few months later with Step 2: “Oh my God! There’s a deficit!” Because of course no one could have predicted that cutting taxes would lead to less revenue and more borrowing.

Suddenly the deficit — which you carefully kept out of the conversation when you were talking about tax cuts — is the Worst Problem Ever. And now that we’re distributing pain instead of bushels of money, everybody is in this together. Suddenly there is no “waste” to cut effortlessly. We all have to “tighten our belts”. The government has “made promises it can’t keep” (at least not at this tax level), so programs will have to be cut across the board — especially the entitlements that go mostly to the middle class.

The latest version of this shell game — the proposal from the “bipartisan” chairs of the Deficit Reduction Panel — is the most blatant I’ve ever seen. If you look at their slide show, you’ll find proposals to cut everything under the Sun — including rich people’s taxes. The slides say that “It is cruelly wrong to make promises we can’t keep” and “A sensible, real plan requires shared sacrifice – and Washington should lead the way and tighten its belt.”

Washington here is a euphemism for people who were counting on government programs — old people, sick people, veterans, the unemployed, and so on. They — and not the rich — need to tighten their belts. While the middle class has to figure out how to retire later, co-pay more of their Medicare expenses, and do without a bunch of other benefits, the tax rate paid by the richest Americans falls from 35% (currently) or 39.6% (if the Bush tax cuts aren’t extended) to 23%. And the corporate tax rate falls from 35% to 26%. Paul Krugman sums up:

this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction?

Amusingly, on the same day I started writing this article, La Feminista made the same point, even using the same term “shell game” to describe it.

A more intellectual critique of the government-has-to-tighten-its-belt approach is Daniel Greenwood’s Prosperity Comes From Justice, Not Austerity in Dissent.

The books I’ve reviewed lately all share a theme: the distribution of wealth. Winner-Take-All Politics described just how skewed the distribution has gotten, and how government policies have helped the ultra-rich pull away from everyone else. Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be that way by using the example of Europe: A 21st-century economy can provide a decent life for everyone. Health care can be a right. Workers can have a say in how their workplaces are organized. Consumption can focus more on public goods like parks and less on private goods like estates. It works.

Now Robert Reich has come out with Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. Reich is coming at the same message from the opposite direction: The winner-take-all economy doesn’t work, even on its own terms. He makes this point by comparing three eras in American history:

• 1975-to-now, when wealth has been concentrating;
• a similar period in the 1920s, leading up to the Great Depression;
• what he calls the Great Prosperity, the 1948-1975 period when wealth was spreading out

The singular virtue of the Great Prosperity was that supply and demand matched, and each pushed the other higher. In a healthy industrial economy, mass production and mass consumption go together. The people who make things earn enough money to buy the things they make. Carpenters can afford houses. Auto workers can afford new cars.

But when the distribution of income gets too skewed towards the rich, you get the bubble economy of the 20s and the last two decades. The financial economy separates from the real economy and goes through a series of speculative booms and busts.

The best account of the boom-bust cycles of the 20s is Fred Lewis Allen’s classic Only Yesterday, which looks back on the 20s from the sadder-but-wiser perspective of the Depression.

After the Florida hurricane, real-estate speculation lost most of its interest for the ordinary man and woman. Few of them were much concerned, except as householders or as spectators, with the building of suburban developments or of forty-story experiments in modernist architecture. Yet the national speculative fever which had turned their eyes and their cash to the Florida Gold Coast in 1925 was not chilled; it was merely checked. Florida house-lots were a bad bet? Very well, then, said a public still enthralled by the radiant possibilities of Coolidge Prosperity: what else was there to bet on?

That’s not just a coincidence; Bubbles are a predictable feature of an economy skewed towards the rich. Reich does an excellent job of explaining why.

Stop me if you’ve heard this. I’ve used this example before to explain the illusion of saving money, and how that makes the financial economy different from the real economy. If it’s obvious to you, skip to the next section.

Before money came into the picture, “saving” meant putting aside real goods. You spent the harvest season stockpiling and canning and preserving so that you could eat through the winter.

Compare that to what might happen today: All summer a college student makes pizzas and saves money. All winter he spends his saved-up money buying pizzas. On the surface this pattern resembles the canning-and-preserving practice, but all those summer pizzas got eaten or thrown away during the summer. No pizzas were put aside, only money.

That’s typical. When you save money, your “savings” is an illusion of the financial economy; the real economy isn’t saving anything. What makes this trick work is the banking system: It circulates your saved money by loaning it to people who will spend it, either to consume something they hope to pay for later, or to invest in something they hope will be productive someday.

Excess saving leads to depression. But everything falls apart if everyone tries to save money at the same time. Because then the only way to work things out is to stop production. (No matter how many people want to make pizzas, if no one is willing to buy them, even on credit, the pizza shop closes.) This can turn into a vicious cycle: Falling production means falling profits and people getting laid off. That scares the people who still have jobs, who save more; and it intimidates the people who might invest in new production, because they don’t see who they’re going to sell their new products to.

Concentrated wealth and bubbles. Now think about what happens when too much of an economy’s income goes to the ultra-rich. The kind of money the ultra-rich make isn’t consumable. (In 2009, the top seven hedge fund managers each made over $1 billion. You just can’t spend that kind of money.) So it gets saved.

If production isn’t going to drop, that saving has to get borrowed and spent by someone else. But who? There’s a limit to how much debt the middle class can carry, so ultimately the savings of the ultra-rich has to be borrowed by other ultra-rich people. We’ve already seen that they can’t consume their income, so they will have to invest it. But in what? If they invest it in increasing production — new factories, new shops, new services — that just kicks the can down the road. Who do they imagine is going to buy their increased production when it comes on line?

Consequently, the money has to go into bubbles: Speculators borrow to bid up the prices of non-productive assets. That’s not some strange accident; it’s what has to happen when the distribution of income gets too far out of whack.

So in the 20s you had a series of land bubbles — Florida, the suburbs — followed by the stock market bubble that popped in 1929. (Stock market bubbles look like productive investments, but they’re really not. Only money invested in new stock goes into the real economy in the form of new factories, shops, and services. Otherwise you’re just bidding up the price of existing assets and not increasing production.) Or, more recently, you get bubbles in internet stocks or houses or gold or oil.

The basic bargain. World War II was the biggest unintentional redistribution of wealth in American history. That’s what ended the Depression. By taxing and borrowing, the government collected massive amounts of money from the rich and paid it out to soldiers and factory workers and farmers and miners.

After the war, veterans benefits together with the legal and social mechanisms established during the New Deal kept the money from flowing back to the rich: not just high taxes on high incomes (tax rates topped out over 90% and stayed that way until the 60s), but educational benefits, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and laws that made it easy to form unions.

The result was what Reich calls the Basic Bargain: If you participate in mass production, you should make enough money to participate in mass consumption. That bargain was the basis for the most widely-shared prosperity in American history.

Since Ronald Reagan we’ve been undoing that bargain, with the result that wages have stagnated even while productivity grows. The pie is bigger, but workers get an ever-smaller slice. At first, middle class households kept spending by sending more women into the workforce. Then they kept spending by borrowing against the bubble-inflated value of their homes. In 2008 their credit ran out and the game stopped: Middle class demand can’t drive the growth of the economy any more.

Restoring the basic bargain. Reich closes with a number of proposals, some of which (like a carbon tax) are more generically liberal than related to the case he has been making.  But his largest proposals are a reverse income tax (sharply higher rates for the rich combined with wage subsidies for the working poor), extending Medicare to everybody, and increasing spending on public goods like parks, libraries, and public transportation.

Unions are a key part of the case Reich is making, but he says little about changing the labor laws. I think labor-law reform is an important part of solving the income-concentration problem.

Think about what a “good job” is. In the collective discussion about the working class, we’ve tended to use the terms good job and manufacturing job interchangeably, as if there were something magical about factories that can’t be duplicated in service industries.

But the magic of the factory jobs of the 50s, 60s, and 70s was this: They were in unionized industries where wage increases could be absorbed by the owner or passed on to the customer. Many service jobs could fit this description, if its workers were organized.

For example, consider baristas at Starbucks. Payscale.com estimates that they average $8.63 an hour. (A Starbucks store manager gets only $13.) But the price of a cinnamon dolce latte has nothing to do with the cost of making it, and there’s no reason that an organized workforce couldn’t force a better deal out of the company. (Some workers are trying.) A cashier at Whole Foods — another place where prices have little to do with cost — starts around $8 an hour and averages about $10.

No law of economics says that retail and other service jobs can’t be good jobs. Workers just need to organize across entire industries, so that non-union stores can’t gain an advantage over union stores. (That’s hard, but government help would make it easier, if government got back to representing people instead of money.) Prices at Wal-Mart would go up, but we might have a stable middle class again, and a growing economy.

For the last two weeks the airwaves have been full of speculation about what the mid-term elections meant and what will happen now that the Republicans control the House. I don’t have a Big Theory that explains it all and tells us what to do next, but I do know a few things:

The voters rejected a straw man. I’m reminded of 2002 and 2004, when voters were still blaming Saddam for 9-11. Voters this year believed all kinds of false things: that Obama had raised taxes when he had in fact cut them; that health care reform raises the deficit when it actually lowers it; that government is growing like a tumor, when both federal spending and the number of government employees dropped in fiscal 2010. And let’s not even get into the numbers of voters who believe that Obama is Marxist Kenyan Muslim imposter.

It’s hard to know what to do with that. People who argue that Obama should “move to the center” seem to imagine that more conservative policies won’t or can’t be painted as the beginning of the Communist revolution. But you would have thought that about using Mitt Romney’s health-care ideas, too. Whatever you do, people can lie about it if they want to.

It’s not 1995. The Gingrich Revolt of 1994 foundered when the Republican Congress shut down the government in 1995. People don’t like the idea that their Social Security checks will be late, and they mostly blamed the Republicans.

But Fox News didn’t launch until 1996. Today a powerful conservative media machine will justify whatever the Republicans do. If they shut down the government (in February, when Congress will need to raise the ceiling on the national debt), no one knows who the public will blame.

If there is a government shut-down, watch the stock market. The Republicans will not bat an eye if grandmothers are begging on the streets, but if the stock market plunges they’ll have to do something.

Or maybe it is 1995. I expect a series of pointless investigations as the Republicans search for some excuse to impeach Obama. If they follow the Clinton-era pattern, they’ll raise a lot of Fantasy-gate issues hoping to stop Obama’s re-election, then move towards impeachment if that doesn’t work.

The Republicans ran on nothing, and have no agenda now. The closest thing they had to a policy proposal was “cut spending”. They never specified what spending, and there aren’t several thousand bridges-to-nowhere they can cancel. Any major spending cut means changing policies that the American people support, like raising the retirement age.

You can’t compromise with “there’s no problem”. Democrats want to do something about people without health insurance and Republicans don’t. Democrats want to do something about global warming and Republicans don’t. Where can they compromise?

Thursday night my two favorite TV hosts were on the same screen: Rachel Maddow interviewed Jon Stewart.

Stephen Colbert interviews the head of the last American manufacturer of marbles, and finds out that Obamacare is actually good for small business.

If you’re a biologist hoping to catalog a previously unknown species of lizard, where should you look? Try a menu.

American Prospect’s Gabriel Arana explains why the bullying gay teens face is different:

It’s not just the schoolyard jerk who picks on you. It’s the pastor who rails against the “gay agenda” on Sunday, the parent who stands up at a city council meeting and says he moved to your city because it’s “the kind of place that would never accept the GLBT community with open arms,” and politicians like New York’s would-be governor Carl Paladino, who on the campaign trail said things like “there is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual.” Even once you get past high school, you still can’t get married or serve in the military, and in most states, your employer can fire you just for being gay. This is the kind of “bullying” gay kids face, and it’s the kind no one’s standing up to.

I had two preconceptions when I started reading this article: James Fallows is a serious guy, and clean coal is not a serious idea. Something had to give.

The gist: The Chinese have done the math, and no credible quantity of alternative energy will allow their billion-plus people to join the 21st century. Oil is eventually going to run out, so either they’re going to figure out how to burn coal cleanly, or they’re going to wreck the planet. That vision gives their research an urgency that American research lacks.

Glenn Beck isn’t an anti-Semite. He just uses anti-Semitic stereotypes to demonize Jews he doesn’t like. See the difference?

The Daily Show explains why Missouri’s new ban on “puppy mills” (huge warehouses raising dogs for sale) is a step on the road to Communism. (Includes a guest appearance by the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan.)

The next time someone tells you that our health-care system is the best in the world, have them read “Too bad we can’t afford to treat your leukemia” by an anonymous Texas doctor.

If a generation of kids expected something different from superheroes twenty years ago, maybe they’ll expect something different from religion now that they’re adults. At least that’s what I claim in the current issue of UU World.

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