The Weekly Sift

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Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.

— Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher

In this week’s Sift:

• Quotations of Chairman Anonymous. American movies and novels and paranoid screeds love to imagine an anonymous oligarchy: some tiny cell of nameless freemasons or immortals or aliens who really pull the strings. Well, thanks to the Supreme Court we have a real one now: Through front groups, a few rich anonymous donors may decide our elections.
• Gaza Update. A UN report on the Gaza flotilla looks bad for Israel, but another report is still coming.
• Spending. Politicians get away with vague calls to “cut spending” because most Americans have no idea how much the government spends or what it spends on. If you go down the list of sacred-cow programs, you don’t get far before you run out of revenue.
• Rick Sanchez. The stupid thing he said about Jews got all the press, but the point his interviewer couldn’t hear about class is more interesting to me.
• Short Notes. Bill Gates’ dad gets soaked and likes it. Donald Duck listens to Glenn Beck. Social networking as a political tool. Defending the stimulus. Latest polls. The phony ACORN pimp’s strange new scheme goes awry. And more.

American pop culture is full of anonymous oligarchies: vampires, cyborgs, aliens, immortals, ascended masters of some mystical discipline — we can’t get enough of the idea that a tiny class of powerful beings is secretly living among us and pulling the strings. Sometimes the motif jumps out of our fiction and becomes an actual hallucination: Opus Dei, Elders of Zion, Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission — they must be the ones who really run things.

Well, this year the holes the Supreme Court has punched in campaign finance law (and Congress’ inability to fill them) have given us a real, live anonymous oligarchy. We can point to their actions, but we can’t say who they are.

Blue Oregon reports what is happening in one congressional district:

In Oregon this week … the Concerned Taxpayers of America began an ad blitz in Southern Oregon, threatening to spend unlimited amounts of money to defeat US Congressman Peter DeFazio. Though commercials will air in heavy rotation, voters will have no idea who is paying to try to influence their decisions.

Thursday Rachel Maddow did a marvelous job fleshing this story out. Concerned Taxpayers of America is front organization headquartered in a house in Washington, D.C. When Rep. DeFazio went to the house (camera crew in tow), the man living there claimed to know nothing about CTA. You can’t find CTA’s web site on Google, and when Rachel did manage to track it down, it contained no mention of rallies, members, events, or even a request to contribute. The site contained only a mission statement and purchased clip art of models who are supposed to represent “concerned taxpayers”.

CTA has already put $165,000 into ads attacking DeFazio, with more presumably to come. (DeFazio told Rachel that a complete campaign in his district typically costs about $500,000.) Given that CTA is so hard to find and isn’t soliciting contributions publicly, it’s a fair bet that their money doesn’t come from ordinary citizens of Oregon’s 4th district. So where, then? Maybe from aliens or vampires, for all we know. CTA doesn’t have to say.

Billionaires are a more likely possibility. Or corporations. News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, just gave $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been running attack ads against Democratic Senate candidates (including Paul Hodes here in New Hampshire). (The Chamber also advertised against the DISCLOSE Act, which would have made it harder to campaign anonymously through dummy organizations.) Which candidates is Fox telling the Chamber to target with its money? They don’t have to say.

When the Citizens United decision was announced, many knowledgable people assured us it was no big deal. “Corporations cannot afford to alienate customers by overt election campaigning,” Columbia law professor Henry Monaghan told the Columbia Law School Magazine.

But what if the customers — like the voters — never find out? If Exxon-Mobil advertises against an environmentalist candidate under its own name, voters at least have a chance to consider the source and discount the ads’ claims accordingly. Offended drivers could boycott Exxon stations rather than have their own money used against them politically. But if the oil is laundered out of Exxon’s money by some front organization that didn’t exist two weeks ago, what then?

Blackwater might balk at openly campaigning for a new war — and even if it did, it might create a backlash. But if it could hide behind some bogus Committee for a Non-Nuclear Iran, then why not? Political advertising could be an effective way to promote new business.

It’s easy to spin these nightmare scenarios about future campaigns, but just think about where we already are. If Peter Defazio loses to Republican Art Robinson, Robinson will owe his seat in Congress to the small number of oligarchs who put up the money for the Concerned Taxpayers of America ad blitz. Oregon voters won’t know who those people are. But Robinson will.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore lauds “Cashocracy: taking the guesswork out of democracy, one million dollars at a time.”

Think Progress points out an odd contradiction: People who identify with the Tea Party are against free trade agreements, believing that they have helped send American jobs overseas. But candidates who identify with the Tea Party strongly support free trade. Maybe the billionaires who fund the Tea Party are calling the shots, not “We the People”.

Monday, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights released its report on the Gaza flotilla incident. (Recall: On May 31, Israel seized six ships that were trying to bring aid to Gaza, which Israel is blockading. Violence broke out on one ship: Nine of that ship’s passengers were killed and seven Israeli commandos were injured.)

The report looks bad for Israel. The worst is on page 27:

Forensic analysis demonstrates that two of the passengers killed on the top deck received wounds compatible with being shot at close range while lying on the ground: Furkan Doğan received a bullet in the face …

Dogan was a 19-year-old Turkish-American. His death and five others are described on page 37 as “extralegal, arbitrary and summary executions”.

The pro-Israeli group CAMERA critiques the report here. The objections boil down to:

• If any other country did the same thing, no one would care. (“It is, after all, nothing less than bigotry and injustice to consistently judge one country by a particular set of standards while failing to apply those standards to the rest of the world.”)
• The UN report relied largely on eye-witness testimony. And since Israel was not cooperating with the investigation, that testimony was primarily from the flotilla passengers, who are anti-Israel activists. In particular, because the Israelis confiscated all video of the raid and released only carefully edited segments, the OHCHR considered the Israeli-approved videos suspect.

While the first point is probably true, it is not exactly a refutation of the report’s conclusions. The second problem is something the Israeli government brought on itself. It could have fully cooperated and released all the video. (Here’s the IDF video. The incident also launched dueling music videos: The pro-Israeli “We Con the World” and the anti-Israeli “Internet Killed Israeli PR” to the tune of “Video Killed the Radio Star”.)

A second UN investigation was announced by the Secretary General in August. Israel is reported to be cooperating with this probe. We should soon see what that cooperation amounts to and whether the resulting report comes to any different conclusions.

See update at the end of the article: It’s worse than I said.

The surest way for a candidate to get applause this season is to promise to “cut spending”. Spending is one of those words that just sounds bad. Spending is the unfortunate half of buying. We all like to get stuff, but we hate to spend.

Just about everybody can remember opening a credit card bill and saying, “I’ve got to stop spending so much.” It feels virtuous to say that, and it costs nothing. But a resolution to cut spending doesn’t leave the realm of fantasy until it starts getting specific. Until you start picking out things you can spend less on — things that you spend more than nickels and dimes on now — you haven’t gotten serious.

One reason we have such a low-quality national conversation about the federal government’s spending is that most of us have no idea how much money the government spends or what it spends it on. So people can promise to “cut spending” while simultaneously promising not to cut just about everything we actually spend money on.

So let’s lay out the basic facts with as little editorializing as possible.

First, the totals. These estimates were made in May and probably won’t match the exact numbers for fiscal year 2010, which ended Thursday. But they’re probably reasonably close.

Fiscal Year 2010.

Revenue: $2.333 trillion. Spending: $3.591 trillion. Deficit: $1.258 trillion

Now let’s drill down into the spending part, starting with the stuff that would have been hardest to cut: interest on the national debt. The only way not to spend that $136 billion would have been to declare bankruptcy.

Next come the sacred cows, most of which you can find on Table S-4 of the link above: Defense, Homeland Security, Veteran’s Benefits, Social Security, and Medicare. It’s not that there’s nothing to cut here, but when a candidate pledges to “cut spending”, he or she usually doesn’t start talking about yanking troops out of Afghanistan or making Grandma pay for her own hip replacement. (The Republicans’ Pledge to America refers to “common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops” before promising to “roll back government spending”.) Complaints about Homeland Security are usually that we aren’t doing enough in terms of keeping out illegal immigrants or stopping drug smuggling. I haven’t heard anybody pledge to cut down on border patrols.

Defense: $707 billion. Homeland Security: $39 billion. Veterans: $124 billion. Social Security: $696 billion. Medicare: $452 billion.

Total so far: $2.018 trillion. If we stop here and zero out everything else, we’ve got a surplus of only $315 billion. (Which is fictitious, of course. Without that additional spending the economy would have shrunk further and revenue would have dropped. But ignore that for now.) For comparison, the surplus recorded in FY 2000 under the Clinton administration was $230 billion.

Next come the relatively uncontroversial payments to people in need: disaster relief, unemployment compensation, and children’s health insurance (SCHIP). Again, it’s not that it’s impossible to cut these programs, but it’s hard to classify them as “waste”. We all want the helicopters to come if we’re stranded by a flood. Unemployment is paid out of a fund that workers and their employers paid into when they had jobs. And SCHIP takes care of sick kids whose parents can’t pay.

disasters: $11 billion. unemployment: $158 billion.  SCHIP: $10 billion.

That’s $179 billion more, so we have $136 billion left.

But we still haven’t taken care of all the sick kids, because many of them get coverage under Medicaid ($290 billion). And the rest of Medicaid is also hard to classify as “waste”. You may object to handing poor people cash that they might spend on drugs or guns, but do you really want to let them die when they get sick?

So there we are: We’ve already got a $154 billion deficit.

And there’s still nearly a trillion dollars we haven’t accounted for: It did stuff like build interstate highways and maintain the national parks, plus thousands of other things that may or may not be wasteful, depending on your point of view: NASA, NSF, EPA, CDC, food stamps, foreign aid, farm subsidies, non-veteran education, and so on. If you don’t want a deficit, you have zero all that stuff out. Not just cut the waste — zero out the whole program.

Summing up: If you were going to balance the 2010 budget without raising taxes, you’d have to cut $154 billion out of interest on the debt, Defense, Homeland Security, Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, disaster relief, SCHIP, Medicaid, and unemployment compensation. And zero out everything else the government does.

So when candidates tell you they’re going to “cut spending”, don’t let them handwave about earmarks, foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, or any other unpopular-but-trivial expense. Any serious attempt to balance the budget without raising taxes is going to involve serious cuts in programs most Americans believe in.

Update: After listing the interest on the debt, I then forgot to add it in. So the total after Defense, Homeland Security, veterans benefits, Social Security and Medicare is $2.154 trillion, leaving only $179 to spend. Then the $179 billion for disasters, SCHIP and unemployment spends all the remaining revenue. (Not a coincidence, BTW. That was my original calculation, which I then thought I found a mistake in.)

So the gist is that the revenue is gone before you spend a dime even on Medicaid.

The story of CNN firing Rick Sanchez is getting plenty of coverage. You’ve undoubtedly already heard that he called Jon Stewart a bigot and then said this:

I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

It got him fired and I have no argument with that. He should have known how close that is to an Elders-of-Zion, Jews-run-the-world conspiracy theory that a lot of dangerous people seriously believe.

Listening to larger chunks of the interview, though, I’m hearing an aspect of the story that isn’t getting any coverage: The conversation turns to race and ethnicity only because the interviewer (Pete Dominick) can’t hear the point Sanchez is trying to make about class prejudice.

Let’s start at the beginning: Dumb things that Sanchez says or does on the air are regularly lampooned on the Daily Show. That’s part of what Stewart does, and he does it to lots of news anchors — but maybe Sanchez more than most.

Early in the interview, Sanchez is trying to say that it’s way too easy for people like Stewart who grew up in educated households to dismiss everybody else as ignorant — not because those people are actually stupid, but because they haven’t been schooled in how educated people are supposed to act and sound.

So Sanchez contrasts Stewart’s father (a physics professor) with his own (a Cuban immigrant who used to “work in a factory, wash dishes, drive a truck, get spit on”). Dominick seems to have no idea what point Sanchez could be trying to make (and Sanchez isn’t very articulate about setting him straight), and can only hear the Jew/Hispanic difference. Dominick argues that Jews and Hispanics are both minorities, so Stewart’s Jewish experience gives him insight and empathy with Sanchez’s Cuban experience.

That ticks Sanchez off — for good reasons, I think. Flustered, he starts trying to explain the difference between Stewart’s career experience and his own, and screws it up.

Here’s the point he should have made: Jon Stewart never had to be a trail-blazer for other Jews; Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce established the Jewish-comedian-doing-edgy-social-commentary thing half a century ago. And he didn’t have to break ceilings; wherever he went, Jews had already been higher up in the organization.

Sanchez had to do both. So no, for both class and ethnic reasons, Stewart’s life experience gives him no insight into Sanchez’s life.

Anyway, Sanchez wasn’t able to think that through on the spot and say it properly, so instead he blurts something stupid that gets him fired. That’s probably also how he said the stupid things that got him skewered on the Daily Show to begin with.

Here’s my take-away point: Class prejudice is so ingrained in the professional class that a lot of people (like Dominick) can’t see it even when someone points to it. Forget whether or not it’s true that Stewart’s criticism of Sanchez was classist — Dominick couldn’t even understand the question.

A lot of criticism of the Tea Party has a classist element, which I am constantly filtering out before quoting it on the Sift.

I’m against Tea Party candidates because they say things that are factually incorrect, they promote theories that bear no resemblance to the way the world works, and they don’t live up to the values they want to impose on the rest of us. But if Sarah Palin wants to say “refudiate” or write notes on her hand or give her children funny names, let her. Those are class markers, not evidence that she would be a bad president.

I’m reminded of what Jack Burden says in my favorite political novel All the King’s Men: “Graft is what he calls it when the fellows do it who don’t know which fork to use.”

The best ad I saw this week: Bill Gates Sr. invites Washington voters to soak the rich.

Rebellious Pixels shows us who Glenn Beck’s target audience is: Donald Duck.

I was going to write about Malcolm Gladwell’s dismissal of social networking as a tool for political activism, but Sam Graham-Felsen said everything I wanted say with more authority. Short version: If you’re using technology instead of interacting with people, that’s bad. If you’re using technology to interact with people better, that’s good.

Or, from the user perspective: If you click a Like button and say, “Done now”, you’re not going to change the world much. But if clicking a Like button is the first tiny commitment that gets you moving towards larger commitments later, then maybe you will.

With all these new technologies, I think it’s useful to imagine what non-telephone users must have asked the first telephone users: “Why are you talking to that machine instead of talking to a real person?”

Stephen Colbert skewers Justice Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution. Scalia claims to be an “originalist”, which means that he wants the Constitution and its amendments interpreted the way they were at the time of ratification (unless you’re talking about corporate rights; those the Court can invent to its heart’s content).

Stephen spells it out:

Scalia must argue that the First Amendment only truly guarantees freedom of speech as it was spoken in 1791. If you don’t like his opinion, it’s his right to say, “Go bugger a Hottentot, you leprous octaroon.” If you’re offended by Scalia’s argument, perhaps you should defend your rights with force of arms. But remember, by this argument the Second Amendment gives you the right only to bear blunderbusses and flintlock pistols.

For those few people who are paying attention to evidence this year, the stimulus was money well spent.

Nate Silver’s current projections: Democrats will hold the Senate 52-48, but lose the House 224-211. As of this morning, TPM’s poll average for the generic congressional ballot has the Republicans up 2%. That margin has been dropping since late August.

In general, polls are weird this year: Different organizations poll the same races at more or less the same time and get wildly different results. You can get depressed every time you see a discouraging poll, or you can look around until you find a result you like better.

My advice: If you were planning to campaign or contribute or otherwise try to affect this election, don’t let a poll change your mind.

I want to see more of these White House White Board talks. In this one, Council of Economic Advisors Chair Austan Goolsbee explains the difference between the Republican and Democratic plans to extend the Bush tax cuts. It’s simple and it’s clear.

James O’Keefe — the guy whose carefully staged and edited videos brought down ACORN, and who is currently serving three years of probation for attempting to bug Senator Landrieau’s office — has finally jumped the shark.

In August, CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau wanted to interview O’Keefe for the CNN documentary “Right on the Edge” about young conservative activists. O’Keefe attempted to lure her onto a boat filled with hidden cameras and sex toys, trying to provoke reactions that could be edited into an embarrassing video. (CNN’s version is here.)

Even O’Keefe’s former employer Andrew Breitbart (promoter of the similarly mis-edited Shirley Sherrod video) describes his plan as “patently gross and offensive“.

Jay Bakker, son of disgraced evangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, preaches about gay marriage — and all the “amens” suddenly stop.

While researching Bakker, I mistyped and wound up reading the blog of Jay Baker, who reposted this marvelous piece about “the gay agenda”.

Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck’s plan to avoid the media is working so well that he’ s now stopped speaking in public at all.

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

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

— Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations”

from his book Propaganda (1928)

In this week’s Sift:

• Why Democrats Are Always on Defense. You’d think a party with only 41 senators would be on the run, desperately trying to prove that it’s still rational and relevant. You’d think that they’d have to come up with new ideas and prove to the electorate that they’ve changed. Nope. What makes Republicans so different from Democrats?
• One Bad Egg Leads to a Half-Billion More. The guy behind the salmonella-tainted eggs is a serial rule-breaker, but he always makes more in profit than he pays in fines.
• The King Legacy. Martin Luther King is now accepted as an American hero. So of course he would be a conservative today and would be proud that Glenn Beck is carrying forward his vision. Or something like that.
• Short Notes. More pictures of the week. Scott Pilgrim. Fox News’ terrorist prince. Bad colleges. What the stimulus really did. And more.

When Democrats were completely out of power, in 2005 or so, we were always told we needed to “move to the center” to have any hope of coming back. We needed to say moderate things, keep our radicals in the closet, and compromise with Republicans to show how reasonable we were.

Then everything associated with the Republican went bust — the wars, the economy, corruption in Congress, Katrina — and the tables turned. Landslide Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 put the Republicans even further out of power than the Democrats ever were. Obama’s 2008 victory margin was many times Bush’s 2004 margin. The Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress were bigger than anything the Republicans had mustered.

So what did Republicans do? Rethink their agenda? Compromise? Shift left? Nope. They’ve voted No on everything, they’ve got their wildest and wooliest we-make-our-own-reality candidates out there, and some current projections have them retaking the House. What’s more, they seem to have control of the national conversation: If they want to make the so-called ground zero mosque an issue, then it’s an issue.

How does that work exactly?

George Lakoff explains, using his often-misunderstood model of frames.

The frustrating and somewhat ironic thing about being a Lakoff fan (as I have been for years) is that the theory of frames is so often mis-framed as sloganeering, as if it denied the importance of real ideas and proposals.

Let me see if I can frame framing better than Lakoff usually does. Suppose you’re a 20-something guy working in an office with a woman you’d like to go out with. It’s not an unreasonable idea: you have pleasantly shared a cafeteria table a couple of times. Now, there are at least four different ways she could picture your relationship: (1) co-workers who get along; (2) co-workers who could become friends outside the office; (3) co-workers who could become a couple; and (4) stalker and victim.

Those are frames — large-scale templates into which events and conversations can be placed — and they are all in her head already, simultaneously. So as you look for  ways to get her attention, things to talk about, activities to suggest, favors to do, or other ways to show interest, the goal is to activate (3), not get trapped in (1) or (2), and make sure (4) never crosses her mind.

That way of strategizing is very different than just “having a good line”. (Lakoff would call the good line “messaging”, not “framing”.) And it’s not magic: If (3) isn’t in her head at all, or if she’s already concluded that (4) is going on, nothing is going to work.

OK, translate to politics. Lakoff is convinced that on most issues a large number of Americans are “biconceptual”. In other words, they can picture the issue more than one way, and support different outcomes depending on how they picture it. Depending on how the topic comes up, they might picture unwed teen mothers either as Bristol Palin or as slum-dwelling drug addicts. What they say should be done about unwed teen mothers could be very different in those two conversations.

So now imagine you’re a liberal trying to pass a teen-pregnancy bill. You could take a poll of four proposals and put forward the most liberal one that gets majority support. That approach is currently seen as “practical” and “realistic”. But it takes the national conversation as given. It doesn’t even consider the question: How many people could support the proposal I really want if I changed the national conversation?

Worse, it ignores this possibility: Coming out in favor of the poll-supported moderate bill could in itself change the national conversation in a way that invalidates the poll. Maybe you’ll move the whole conversation to the right so that it then becomes “practical” for you to take an even more conservative position.

For example, you can see that happening in the ground-zero-mosque issue, where starting the conversation in four different places leads to four different conclusions:

1. Muslims share the same religious freedom all other Americans have. (So: their beliefs should have nothing to do with what they can build.)
2. Muslims were responsible for 9-11. (So it’s not appropriate for them to build close to Ground Zero. Let them build the Park 51 project somewhere else.)
3. Some American Muslims are loyal to our country and some aren’t. (So you have to look at the background of the Cordoba Initiative and Imam Rauf before deciding whether they should be allowed to build anywhere.)
4. Muslims can’t be good Americans because America is at war with Islam. (Mosques by definition are recruiting centers for terrorists, so the fewer that get built, the better.)

Lots of Americans are biconceptual about this: They could see the issue more than one way. But if you take a poll, (1)&(2) put together give you a majority. So a “practical” Democrat does what Harry Reid did and comes out for (2). Nod towards the constitutional right to build as in (1), but recommend that Imam Rauf be wise enough to build somewhere else.

But look how that changes the conversation. Now all the Democrats supporting (1) have to explain why they can’t be as “reasonable” as Reid, and Republicans who support (2) will have to face the dreaded “So you agree with Harry Reid?” Also, Reid has unintentionally validated a lot of people’s vague notion that Islam is not like other religions, so support for (3) and (4) goes up. And people who promote (4) are emboldened, knowing that the principled opposition to them is crumbling.

I don’t have data to back this up, but I believe that by adopting the poll-driven position, Reid and other “moderate” Democrats have changed the poll. The center is now moving towards (3).

This happens on issue after issue. On health care, it happened many times: One “compromise” position after another got recast as the socialist government take-over.

Republicans never make this mistake. They have a few very abstract basic frames, like “taxes and regulations hurt the economy”; “traditional values make society strong”; “America’s enemies are insane or evil, so they have to be intimidated, not reasoned with”; and a handful of others. Everything they do gets couched in those terms, so they are constantly building those ideas up. When the electorate goes against them, they don’t compromise, they try to turn the conversation back into channels that work in their favor.

One reason conservatives can function differently is that they have a huge infrastructure. Out-of-office Democrats disappear from public view or sell out to corporate interests as lobbyists, while out-of-office Republicans like Palin and Huckabee and Rove get showcased by Fox News. Staffers of defeated Democrats have to pound the pavement looking for their next job, while Republican staffers have jobs waiting at Cato or Heritage or one of the other think-tanks.

That conservative infrastructure requires lots of money, and they don’t get it by passing the hat among ordinary Americans. Naturally, a lot of it comes from corporations, but a lot also comes from individual billionaires.

A recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer profiled one of the biggest sources: the Koch brothers, owners of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in America. (Sift readers already knew about the Kochs — pronounced “Coke” — from a Greenpeace report I pointed you to in April.)

A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

Mayer quotes an environmental lawyer’s account of how the game works:

You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank, [which] hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.

I wasn’t going to say much about the massive egg recall, but Grist has three great articles on it. First, a clip of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) talking to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta:

Cheap food is wonderful. We all like cheap food. But we have to understand that when we’re spending billions to deal with a salmonella outbreak, it isn’t really as cheap as it seems.

Stephen Budiansky’s NYT piece extolling the efficiency of factory farming (Math Lessons for Locavores) drew an intelligent response from Tom Philpott: The half-billion egg salmonella recall illustrates that efficiency cuts both ways. A small number of vast, interlocking producers is an efficient way to distribute pathogens as well as eggs.

And finally, Grist profiles Jack DeCoster, the guy behind the half-billion bad eggs. He’s a bad egg himself, responsible for a long series of health, environment, and worker-safety violations going back to 1996. He’s paid millions in fines, but that’s just part of the cost of doing business.

Saturday was the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”. So of course a lot of white people got together on the spot of Dr. King’s speech to listen to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Beck said the date-and-place correspondence was unintentional. (Actually, he attributed it to “divine providence”. God doesn’t let anything happen to Beck accidentally.) But then he decided it was appropriate because “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.” Which brought this response from Jon Stewart:

Black people don’t own Martin Luther King. White people own … Oh, wait. … That’s not right.

But Glenn feels he has to speak out to defend Dr. King’s legacy because

Far too many have even gotten just lazy, or they have purposefully distorted Martin Luther King’s ideas of “judge a man by the content of this character.” Lately in the last twenty years we’ve been told that character doesn’t matter.

I often wish real life were like Wikipedia, and I could just insert a [citation needed] at points like this. Has anyone ever seriously put forward the idea that “character doesn’t matter”? Who? When?

Beck claimed King’s legacy even more emphatically on May 26.

We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we [citation needed] were the people that did it in the first place.

No idea what he’s talking about there. (The people who actually “did it in the first place” have a web site.)

This much is clear: The Right may have harassed and vilified King while he was alive, but now that he is safely dead (and, they hope, remembered only as a collection of sound bites) they want to give him a conservative make-over. (I’ve commented elsewhere on the make-over Beck has given Thomas Paine.)

And it’s surprisingly easy: After you have co-opted words like character and freedom and God, you have the high ground and your tanks can roll on to conquer King’s legacy at will.

After all, King ended his speech by dreaming of a day when all people could join in singing:

Free at last. Free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

And isn’t that just what Beck and the other Tea Party folks stand for? After all, what could King possibly have meant by free if not free from taxes, free from unions, free from foreign languages, free from having to explain gays to your kids, free to keep mosques out of your neighborhood, free from scientific facts you don’t want to believe, free to work in unsafe conditions if you want to (or if you can’t get a job anywhere else), free to go without health insurance, free to say “nigger” or any other word you feel like saying (and free from criticism if you do), free to refuse service to anybody you don’t like, free to put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as strikes your fancy, and so on.

You know, free. Like Martin said. Free at last.

I’m not even going to argue about it right now, because even that misses the point. Having a he-said-she-said struggle over King’s legacy is a poor way to celebrate King’s legacy.

Here’s what I think people should do in honor of the Dream speech: Read it. Or listen to it. Don’t let Martin Luther King become a symbol that people fight to own, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Let him continue to be a voice that we listen to. Read the ten demands of King’s March on Washington (including #7: “A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — in meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”) Read the Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Pick some speech or sermon of King’s at random and read it.

See for yourself.

I went rambling through the KIng speeches and found this one delivered in Grosse Pointe, Michigan a month before his assassination. This part seemed relevant to current arguments between moderate and liberal Democrats:

We started dramatizing the issue of the denial of the right to vote and I submit to you that three months later as a result of that Selma movement, the same President who said to me that we could not get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress was on the television singing through a speaking voice “we shall overcome” and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill . . . and we did get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress. Now, I could go on to give many other examples to show that it just doesn’t come about without pressure

Ghost Day in Taiwan, Festival of the Tooth in Sri Lanka, lightning on Lake Geneva — it’s just another Week in Pictures.

Scott Pilgrim, BTW, is the most original movie I’ve seen in a long time, and one of its video-game motifs solves a problem the romantic comedy has been struggling with for decades: the ending. Nobody really believes the happily-ever-after ending any more, but the romantic comedy has never come up with a replacement. So movies have been winking knowingly at happily-ever-after at least since that what-now series of expressions Dustin Hoffman flashed at the end of The Graduate. But they’ve been stuck with it.

In Scott Pilgrim, the star-crossed couple conquers its obstacles and gets to the door. What’s behind the door? Obviously: the next level, whatever that may be. This video-game metaphor for success is the most satisfying and realistic ending a romantic comedy could have these days.

The photography and online video is stunning in the New York Times Magazine piece on the power game in women’s tennis.

Last week I linked to Jon Stewart’s demonstration of how Fox News’ guilt-by-association methods could be used to link Fox News itself to terrorism — through their parent company’s second largest stockholder, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. (There’s no particular reason to think the Prince is a terrorist, but he’s easy to link to radical Wahhabist sects of Islam through his family.)

Well, Fox didn’t learn its lesson. Last Monday morning, Fox & Friends was speculatively tracing the potential funding sources for the Ground Zero Mosque, and made sinister implications about the Kingdom Foundation, a Saudi charity headed by “a guy who … funds radical madrassas all over the world.”

The “guy” was never named, but he turns out to be — you guessed it, right? — Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. So Jon just had do a follow-up report suggesting that the way to shut off funds to the Ground Zero Mosque is to stop watching Fox News, because money they make goes to the Prince who might give it to the mosque project.

He went on to wonder whether the folks on Fox & Friends knew they were slandering their second-largest stockholder, and maybe that’s why they didn’t mention his name. He then brought two Daily Show regulars to discuss whether Fox didn’t connect these dots because they were stupid and didn’t know, or evil and intentionally hiding their own connections. John Oliver represented Team Stupid and Wyatt Cenac Team Evil.

Washington Monthly turns a searchlight on bad colleges that go on for years with microscopic graduation rates. It turns out that even among colleges that accept low-income students with low grades and test scores, graduation rates vary widely. Some colleges have graduation rates as low as 5%. And the difference isn’t that they maintain high standards:

the colleges that successfully graduate low-income and minority students don’t ask less of them. They ask more. Researchers have found that more challenging coursework makes success rates go up, not down.

Why are these dropout factories tolerated? Why do they continue to get state funds and why are students allowed to waste government grants and loans on them? Because “the world is run by college graduates” who didn’t go to such places and have no idea what goes on there. If you start with students nobody cares about and don’t help them rise, nobody will hear about your failure.

Stephen Colbert takes on the how-Obama-can-prove-he’s-not-Muslim problem. Solution: He needs to be more Christlike and let his enemies crucify him.

On OpenLeft, Paul Rosenberg brings Matthew 25:42-43 up to date:

I was unemployed and you called me a lazy good for nothing bum. I was old and you called me a “greedy geezer”. I was a stranger, and you cursed me and cast me out. I was sick and you looked after the insurance company. I was in prison and you said, “Why isn’t he dead”?

What did the stimulus do? A lot of good stuff.

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

We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.

— Albert Einstein, 1930

In this week’s Sift:

• Lining Up the Next War. Talk about attacking Iran stopped for a while after Obama got elected. It’s back.
• Fire, Flood, Drought. The bad stuff that’s happening this summer doesn’t necessarily prove global warming, but it’s the kind of thing you can expect to see more of if the Earth keeps getting hotter.
• Short Notes. The L.A. Times’ Framework site is a stunning collection of topical photos. Glenn Beck sounds more and more like an evangelist, or maybe a messiah. Why Palin won’t run. A bogus argument for repatriating Muslims. VW’s prototype Dung Beetle. Government isn’t spending as much as you think. And more.

In the 19th century, a grain trader (in a reference I’ve never been able to find again) remarked that studying the fluctuations of the wheat market was like watching a wrestling match with a blanket thrown over it: You can tell when the wrestlers are doing something, but not what it is or who is doing it.

I had the same feeling this week when the idea of war with Iran surfaced again. During the Bush administration this used to happen every few months. Someone who wanted us to attack Iran would leak some (possibly false) information about how they were closer to building nuclear weapons than previously thought, and the right-wing media would go wild. Or someone who didn’t want war would leak some (possibly false) information that the decision to attack Iran had already been made, and the administration was in the process of creating the official justifications. Then the left-wing media would go wild.

I have gotten cynical about all this: It’s a wrestling match under a blanket. I can’t figure out who really wants us to attack Iran and why, or who is opposing them and why. As we saw in the build-up to the Iraq War, the reasons that appear in the media are almost all attempts at manipulation. It is difficult to figure out who really believes what.

President Obama’s election ended that talk for a while. But it started again this week with Jeffrey Goldberg’s article (“The Point of No Return“) which is on the cover of the current Atlantic. (Well, it really started two weeks before that in the Weekly Standard, a publication so far to the right that it’s hard to take seriously. What country do they want to live in peace with?)

Goldberg’s article begins with a list of all the peaceful ways a crisis could be avoided, and then concludes that none are likely.

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran … They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Goldberg’s visions are dramatically specific: names, timetables, model numbers of airplanes. His highly placed Israeli sources have reached “consensus … that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”

Once we take that “better than 50 percent chance” as a given, Goldberg’s next question is whether it would be better for the United States to launch the attack instead: Our air force is bigger and would have a better chance of success. An anonymous source identified as an “Arab foreign minister” thinks we should attack, or at least make a serious bluff:

Iran will continue on this reckless path, unless the administration starts to speak unreasonably. The best way to avoid striking Iran is to make Iran think that the U.S. is about to strike Iran.

And of course these Arab countries will all rejoice if we do attack, just as Iraqis greeted us as liberators. And the democracy movement in Iran will rally around us rather than around their own government. And as Iranians are having their noses rubbed in the dirt, they will not think: “We really do need nuclear weapons.”

It’s striking how Goldberg’s article appears to set a reasonable tone, while simultaneously removing all serious points of contention from the discussion: He takes as given that the Iranians are bent on getting nuclear weapons as soon as possible, and doesn’t even mention that the most recent National Intelligence Estimate disagrees. And besides, what matters is not what is true, but what the Israelis believe. They feel threatened, so there will be war; our only choice is what kind of war it will be.

He offers the possibility that maybe the threat of an American strike will be enough. But of course if it isn’t, we’ll then have to go through with the threat, won’t we? Not because it will work — that’s another possible point of contention that is somehow irrelevant — but because we’d lose credibility.

And the dire scenarios that justify the risks of war never justify corresponding risks of peace-making: The vision of a nuclear-free Middle East, with Israel’s WMD programs also on the table, never comes up:

The most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state.

Unalterable. Carved in stone. Reasonable people wouldn’t even question it. Why can’t those crazy Iranians just accept that they live under the nuclear hegemony of a hostile power?

Other writers have taken up the details of Goldberg’s argument: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in Foreign Policy, Glenn Greenwald, and Jonathan Schwarz, just to name a few.

They point out that Goldberg has done this before: in a 2002 New Yorker article about the evils of Saddam Hussein, including his ties to al Qaeda (that proved to be mythical) and ominous assessments of his WMD program (also mythical):

There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East.

There is no accountability in journalism. The invasion of Iraq has cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives — all to avoid nightmare scenarios that turned out to be imaginary. Eight years later, one of the primary purveyors of those nightmares is back with new nightmares, pushing a new war to avoid them. And a respectable publication like The Atlantic gives him their cover.

But the problem is not Goldberg, or all the other malpracticing journalists who justified the Iraq War with falsehoods and are still getting published. (Judith Miller had an article in the Wall Street Journal last Monday — about Iraq, no less.) Goldberg’s article is a move under the blanket. There will be more as the case for attacking Iran marches further into the mainstream. Where are these notions coming from, ultimately? Who knows?

But they will all push one Big Illusion: that war is the safe option. If we can’t figure out what else to do, we should go to war, because that always works. Articles and talking heads will pretend to examine the what-ifs, but they will take for granted that Iran can only respond in foreseeable ways, and will express confidence that we have those scenarios covered.

That’s not what happened in Iraq. None of the war-pushers’ crystal balls predicted a popular insurgency that we’d still be fighting seven years later. (Other crystal balls did show an insurgency. But the public didn’t hear those voices until it was too late.) But nothing is more typical of war: Push an enemy to the wall and he becomes desperate and clever. He thinks of new options that your think-tank experts didn’t consider.

War is not safe. No matter what cards you are holding or think that the other players are holding, war is a wild risk. We can’t let the propagandists fool us into forgetting that again.

Or maybe the next war won’t be televised. Sunday’s New York Times focused on

the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

When it works, it’s just the thing: Imagine if a robot drone had blown up Bin Laden’s inner circle while they were planning 9-11. The bad guys vanish and we aren’t left picking up the pieces of some country’s shattered government.

The NYT does a good job of outlining the problems too: Robot drones don’t develop relationships with the local population. So your intelligence is always second hand, and you blow up the wrong people sometimes. When you do, on-the-ground al Qaeda propagandists are there to take advantage.

And there’s a larger problem: The temptations of a secret murder machine are more than human virtue can handle. Even if it isn’t being abused now, someday it will be.

This summer we’ve seen record heat and drought in Russia ruin the wheat crop and lead to wildfires that filled Moscow with smoke. (It looked even worse from space.) We’ve seen record monsoons in Pakistan lead to floods, at least 1500 deaths so far, and  and massive public health problems. Greenland just lost a 100-square mile chunk of ice — the biggest in 50 years.

So is it the Apocalypse or global warming? Lester Brown is cautious about his claims, but says the Russia crop failure is exactly the kind of thing we should expect to see more of as the Earth heats up.

Are this record heat wave and the associated crop shortfall the result of climate change? Not necessarily. No single heat wave, however extreme, can be attributed to global warming. What we can say is that heat and drought similar to that experienced in Russia are projected to occur more frequently as the earth’s temperature continues to rise in the decades ahead. This Russian heat wave lets us see just how brutal future climate change can be.

He then connects these dots:

• heat waves shrink harvests (about 10% for every degree degree Celsius or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)
• every year the Earth has 80 million more mouths to feed
• about 3 billion people (mostly in places like China and India) are taking advantage of economic growth to eat more meat, which ultimately requires more grain
• around 30% of the U.S. grain harvest is producing ethanol fuel for cars

And concludes:

Surging annual growth in grain demand at a time when the earth is heating up, when climate events are becoming more extreme, and when water shortages are spreading makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up. This situation underlines the urgency of cutting carbon emissions quickly–before climate change spins out of control.

Ditto for Pakistan and Greenland. These kinds of things could happen at random, but they’ll happen at random a lot more often as the climate gets hotter.

You could pleasantly spend hours rummaging through the L.A. Times photography site Framework. The Pictures in the News feature is always worthwhile. Want cute animals? We got cute animals. Meteors over Stonehenge? Something out of the archives? Something pastoral? Newsy? Artsy? Sporty?

Most places on the web, you have to sift through a lot of crap to find the really good stuff. Not here. It’s just one OMG shot after another until you decide to stop.

Glenn Beck wants to save your soul, and he’s getting increasing messianic about it.

Markos Moulitsas and I have the same assessment of Sarah Palin:

So watch, she’ll make noise about running for president in 2012, but when push comes to shove, she doesn’t have the work ethic to actually campaign. She’ll bask in the attention, sell lots of books, and get $100K per speech. But the second it becomes hard work, she’ll call it quits.

I predict a long attention-milking tease: a year or more of hints and winks, culminating in an announcement that she needs to protect her family from the vicious media, and besides she can do more good for the American people by tweeting 140-character policy treatises and giving $100K speeches to audiences who don’t get to ask questions.

Here’s a lesson in how propagandists can turn legitimate research to their own purposes. In a survey of French Muslims, 60% said they identified equally as French and as Muslim, 14% as primarily French, and 22% as primarily Muslim. The headline reporting this in Le Figaro described French Muslims as “well integrated”.

This got quoted by a Danish psychologist as “only 14% of the Muslim populations … see themselves as more French … than Muslim”, which supports his claim that “Integration of Muslims in western societies is not possible.”

And this Dane is then referenced by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association who calls for “a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S.” and repatriation of “Muslims who have already immigrated here … back to Muslim countries”.  He attributes this conclusion to “simple Judeo-Christian compassion”. After all, “Why force [American Muslims] to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?”

Just for context, I’d like to see a survey of people who contribute to the American Family Association: Do they consider themselves primarily Christian, primarily American, or equally Christian and American?

Anderson Cooper has been debunking the “terror baby” fantasy of the extreme Right. (They think pregnant terrorist women will come here to have their babies, and that they will then take those babies home to raise as terrorists. In 20 years: a terrorist with U.S. citizenship!) He asks Rep. Gohmert if he has any evidence for his claims, lets Gohmert rant without cutting off his mike, but repeatedly points out that Gohmert has offered no evidence.

I’m sure Gohmert sees this as evidence of Cooper’s “left-wing bias”. But if someone claims the sky is green, there’s nothing biased about going outside, looking up, and reporting that the sky is still blue. That’s a reporter’s job.

I can’t remember the last time I agreed with something at National Review, but Josh Barro pulls together all the sensible points about the Ground Zero Mosque — including one I hadn’t thought about: In Manhattan, a 13-story building two blocks away is invisible (a point made even more graphically by this image). And then he explains the issue in terms conservatives ought to understand:

Part of supporting limited government is understanding that sometimes, things you don’t like will happen, and the government (especially the federal government) won’t do anything about it. Getting to do what you want comes at the price of other people getting to do what they want—including build mosques where you’d prefer they didn’t.

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr would have been a child if we’d tried him promptly. But after 8 years in Guantanamo we can try him as an adult.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Gail Collins tells the story of Harry Burn, a 24-year-old state legislator who casts the decisive vote for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment after getting a note from his Mom.

Yes, you can run a car on sewage. VW has a methane-powered prototype it calls the Bio Bug, but I prefer Discovery’s name for it: the Dung Beetle.

Or, if you want to use human muscle rather than human waste, there’s this muscle/electric hybrid. Four “rowers” can get it going 60 mph on their own, or you can tap the battery. Or look at it this way: If it runs out of juice, you can still row your way home.

Portugal gets 45% of its electricity from renewable sources. It’s expensive, but it works.

The Conservapedia — the right-wing response to that leftist Wikipedia — says that Einstein’s theory of relativity is “heavily promoted by liberals”. But Conservapedia knows it must be false because it doesn’t allow for action-at-a-distance, as witnessed by John 4:46-54.

The Onion reports an everyday environmental disaster: A crude oil tanker safely reaches port. “In a matter of days, this oil may be refined into a lighter substance that, when burned as fuel in vehicles, homes, and businesses, will poison the earth’s atmosphere on a terrifying scale.”

The Onion News Network holds a talking-heads debate on whether Biblical theories of Armageddon should be taught in addition to global warming. “What’s so wrong,” the anchor asks “with kids being exposed to both views of how they’ll die?”

And Onion Sports Network discusses a football coach’s decision to retire from his family to spend more time with the team. OSN reports that after 41 years of family life the coach “felt that he had nothing left to prove as a husband and father.” The OSN expert then speculates on who will replace the coach as head of the household, with attention focusing on a neighbor, his wife’s high school boyfriend, and another former football coach.

If you ask anybody, they’ll tell you that government spending is way up under Obama, and the economy’s continuing weakness is proof that government spending doesn’t work as a stimulus.

Well, not exactly. Increased federal spending has mainly just compensated for decreased state and local spending. So net government spending isn’t way up, and now that the federal stimulus (which included major aid to the states) is ending, the overall amount of government spending in the economy is set to go down.

Conservatives will describe those losing their government jobs as “bureaucrats”, but most of them will be teachers, firemen, and police.

Paul Krugman makes the same point in a wonkier way.

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

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

—Sydney J. Harris

In this week’s Sift:

• My Journalism Reading Project: a work in progress. In a democracy, the People are supposed to be sovereign and the news media is supposed to be their intelligence agency. I’m trying to figure out why it’s not working that way.
• What’s Really Wrong With America: Too Many Free Books. When I think about government waste, I don’t usually think about libraries. But some people do. And other people wonder whether facts make any difference.
• Respectable, Sensible Bigotry. Accusations against Mel Gibson and the Tea Party are not just political correctness run wild.
• Disinformation Watch. It’s a shame that anybody has to waste time keeping track of the made-up stories in the news, but somebody does.
• Short Notes. The Times is still keeping an eye on Palestine. The Palins do soap opera way better than the Clintons. And Nate Silver graphs same-sex marriage.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the sovereign of your own little country. You’re queen or generalissimo or president-for-life or something. If you wanted to do your job well, how much would you want to know about your country?

Silly question, right? You’d want to know everything you could. To the extent that your administration could afford them, you’d want to have agents of all sorts bringing you information: people who kept track of all your government’s projects and how they were progressing, who kept you up-to-date on the business climate, who monitored the health and safety of your citizens, and so on. You’d also want experts compiling statistics and noticing trends so that you could stay ahead of events. Outside your borders, you’d want agents keeping track of all the foreign countries that affected your homeland — trade partners, allies, threats, rivals.

And what would happen if you didn’t have that information? People who did would manipulate you into serving their interests rather than yours or your country’s. You’d sign things you didn’t understand. You’d empower underlings to go off and do God-knows-what. Even when you thought you were deciding things, you wouldn’t be; someone else would have laid it all out for you so that you really only had one choice.

Well, guess what? You are a sovereign. That’s what democracy is supposed to mean: the people are sovereign; they rule. You rule.

And there is an army of agents out there bringing you information. That’s what the news media is supposed to be: your intelligence agency. They’re supposed to be gathering the information you need to rule, figuring out what it all means, and presenting it to you in a way that you can absorb and use. And when they don’t, you and your country are at the mercy of whoever does have the information.

And so You the People, We the People, find ourselves going to war for reasons that turn out to be false, or being stampeded into covering the multi-billion-dollar losses of dishonest investment banks. When we try to do something in our own interests, like guaranteeing each other’s access to health care or heading off global warming, it’s incredibly difficult because of all the disinformation we have to wade through — death panels, Climategate, and much, much more.

So our intelligence agency has been letting us down. And things are getting worse: news agencies are closing bureaus and laying off reporters to save money. Can you picture any other sovereign allowing that? After 9-11, when it looked like the CIA and FBI had fallen down on the job, did the U.S. government respond by slashing their budgets and firing a bunch of agents? No, quite the opposite.

In many ways this is a big, complicated topic, but this much of it is simple: We the People haven’t been taking our sovereignty seriously. And we’ve tolerated both our government and the media corporations not taking it seriously either. We haven’t demanded the high-quality information that we need to do our jobs.

Scads of books have been written in the last few years about the sorry state and poor prospects of American journalism, and lately I’ve given myself the project of trying to read them. I’ll be telling you what I learn in dribs and drabs rather than saving it all for one big report.

Here’s one thing I’ve picked up already: Chapter 3 of McChesney and Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism contains some American history I had never run across before: Apparently the Founders really did take the sovereignty of the people seriously, and did consider the press to be the People’s intelligence agency.

That wasn’t just pious rhetoric. They spent serious money to subsidize that era’s equivalent of the Internet: the Post Office. Under the early presidents, America built the best postal service in the world, and had one of the highest literacy rates. That wasn’t just the result of our rugged individualism or our protestant desire to read the Bible for ourselves; it was social policy. Because, as Jefferson put it:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters to convey newspapers free of all charge for postage. They are not only the vehicles of knowledge and intelligence, but the sentinels of the liberties of our country.

And that brings us to the next story.

Like a lot of states, Illinois and its cities have budget problems. And Fox Chicago has spotted a fat pile of government waste: public libraries.

There are 799 public libraries in Illinois. And they’re busy. People borrow more than 88 million times a year.

But keeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.

That’s money that could go elsewhere – like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions.

But why spend more money on education when the schools could eliminate their own wasteful shelves of books? Bob Herbert quotes the AP:

As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.

And he comments:

What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.

Could anything be more unfaithful to the vision of the Founders or the sovereignty of the People? (See previous article.) All our discussions about the value of education for the individual miss the point. If we were a monarchy, we would spare no expense educating the Crown Prince, and consider ourselves fortunate if he showed any interest in our efforts.

In a democracy, the children collectively are the Crown Prince. We are educating the future sovereign — not for his or her benefit, but for ours. Far more than sending troops to distant corners of the world, educating American children to wield their future sovereignty wisely is the cost of freedom. We should pay it, even in hard times.

Now let’s talk about libraries. A lot of Americans don’t really need libraries any more. If we’re rich, we can buy all the books we want. If we’re middle-class, we can afford a broadband internet connection. Probably our homes have at least one quiet room where we or our children can think and study.

But if you’re poor, or just struggling, you may not have any of that. Lots of children are growing up in homes without books, without the internet, and without quiet places to do their homework. They may or may not use the library for those purposes — that’s up to them and their parents. But as long as the library is open, the door to our culture is not completely closed.

What’s that worth to you? What’s that worth to our country?

While we’re talking about education and democracy, it’s worth looking at an article in the Boston Globe from last week:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.

They studied popular political falsehoods (like “we found WMDs in Iraq”) and whether people who believe them change their opinion when given the facts. For the most part they don’t, and many people just dig in deeper, believing even more strongly after someone has tried to correct them.

I’ll quibble with the idea that this is a “recent” discovery. My journalism reading project includes Walter Lippmann’s 1921 classic Public Opinion:

The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them

When I think about how majority stereotypes of women, blacks, and gays/lesbians has changed since my childhood in the 1960s, though, I despair less about democracy than the Globe does. Stereotypes change, but only when people are confronted with new facts again and again, over a period of years.

Democracy works, but it works slowly, and only if lots of people are willing to insist on the truth day-in, day-out, while talking to their friends and co-workers over coffee.

Which brings us to the next story.

Ever notice how often somebody portrayed as an innocent victim of political correctness turns out later to have been a flaming bigot all along?

Frank Rich connects the Mel Gibson dots. Critics who found Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” anti-Semitic were themselves tarred as anti-Christian bigots — until Mel got drunk and started ranting to police about “the f**king Jews”. More recently, tapes of Mel’s verbally abusive remarks to his girl friend have come out, laced with the N-word and other slurs.

That poor guy, victimized by those over-sensitive Jews and their baseless charges.

This week, it’s the Tea Party. The NAACP passed a resolution asking the Tea Party to “repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches”.

So of course recent Tea Party Express VP Mark Williams was all over the airwaves telling us who the real racists are: the NAACP, making their hateful charges against the fine upstanding white people of the Tea Party. Centrists and even some liberal pundits were taking a head-shaking why-did-you-have-to-start-this attitude towards the NAACP.

Then Williams overplayed his hand: He posted a parody letter from the NAACP president to President Lincoln asking to have slavery back:

We had a great gig.  Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.  Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Yeah, that’s not racist. It’s — you know — funny. Right? And so was the suggestion that the NAACP finds tax cuts racist because …

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?

Hilarious. Where does that humorless NAACP get off implying folks like this are racists?

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates wrap up:

Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry

His point: We can’t let that grade-school “I’m not but you are” taunt intimidate us away from pointing out bigotry wherever it shows up.

Do illegal immigrants help or hurt the U.S. economy? Arguments both ways sound very convincing, but have a lot of holes. I haven’t yet found an analysis I can endorse wholeheartedly.

A report put out by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that illegal immigrants get a net government subsidy (benefits minus taxes) of $113 billion a year. But if you crunch some numbers in the report itself, you find that $38 billion of that goes to educating the American-citizen children of the immigrants. Thats us investing in our citizens’ future, not a “benefit” to illegal immigrants. I’ve got to wonder how many similar factors inflate the numbers.

A report by the Perryman Group estimated that making undocumented workers suddenly vanish (as in the movie A Day Without a Mexican) would lower GDP by $245 billion a year. However, its assumptions about the labor shortage in the native-born population are a lot less convincing now than they were when the report was published two years ago.

Since I can’t find or generate any trustworthy economic analysis, I’ll have to settle for a more anecdotal understanding.

One of the main characters in Nick Redding’s nonfiction book Methlandis Roland Jarvis, a native-born white American who starts out working in a meat-packing plant in Iowa, making $18 an hour with benefits. Over several years, the plant gets sold and resold, with each new owner slashing jobs and cutting wages (under the threat of closing the plant or moving it to Mexico), until workers make $6.50 an hour with no benefits. Jarvis tries to keep up his lifestyle by working extra hours (and smoking meth for extra energy), but eventually he gives that up to cook and deal meth full time.

A bunch of the people who take the low-wage no-benefit meat-packing jobs are illegal immigrants with some kind of phony paperwork. They do a hard, dirty and sometimes dangerous job that used to pay enough for an American worker to support a family and also pull his or her weight in the larger community through taxes. Now it doesn’t, so the plant workers (legal and illegal alike) are generating the kinds of costs the FAIR report tabulated: Their emergency-room visits and their kids’ education cost government more than their taxes cover. In essence, the workers are subsidized.

But who’s getting really getting that subsidy? Looking at the work and lifestyle of the immigrants, I don’t think it’s them. They earn what they get, and probably more.

Here’s what I see happening: The company pays its workers less than a living wage, and the government makes up the difference. To the extent that the meat-packing industry is competitive and efficient — not all industries are — the cost-reduction gets passed on to the consumer as lower meat prices. The rest is profit.

I think that’s typical. Whether we’re talking about cheap factory work, cheap child-care in our homes, cheap kitchen workers in our restaurants, cheap janitors in office buildings — the presence of illegal immigrants drives down costs. Some of that shows up in increased business profits and some in a lower cost-of-living for the rest of us. But it costs the government money.

It also costs unskilled American workers by driving down their wages — though it’s hard to tell how many of those jobs would just vanish overseas (maybe to be done by the same people who come here to do them now) if wages were higher.

Summing up: The subsidy FAIR noticed is just the visible piece of a larger social/economic policy decision to have a low-price low-wage economy. If we had an economy that respected hard work — one that paid workers a wage that allowed them to support both their families and the larger community — the subsidy would go away. But things would cost more.

In the absence of reliable numbers, I’ll just give my gut impression: I think middle and upper-class Americans do well out of illegal immigration, the working class not so well.

Most people don’t want health care reform repealed.

Illegal votes by felons did not give Al Franken his seat in the Senate.

The “scandal” about the Justice Department “protecting” the fringy New Black Panther Party is completely trumped up. Newsweek concludes:

it’s not about a real investigation; it’s about staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration.

New British and Dutch reports say the same thing as every other official investigation: The only scandal in Climategate was stealing the researchers’ emails. Unfortunately, they can’t get the front-page coverage that the bogus stories got.

And finally, I’m not sure how you debunk something this nutty: A Republican Congressional candidate in Missouri claims Obama and the Democrats are taking away “the freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.” Don’t look at me — I said at the time that deporting the Holy Spirit was a bad idea.

Follow-up to last week: The NYT has yet another Israel/Palestine article with no precipitating event. Like the Kristof column I quoted last week, these reporters see the blockade failing to undermine Hamas:

Today Hamas has no rival here. It runs the schools, hospitals, courts, security services and — through smuggler tunnels from Egypt — the economy.

The best soap operas always find some way to stay fresh. Unwed pregnancy, break-up, acrimony, drug charges, nude photos — and now the Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston wedding is back on.

Meanwhile, those family-values-destroying Clintons are having a wedding of their own: Former first-daughter Chelsea is getting married at age 30. There’s no baby. She’s just marrying a guy she’s known since her teens, after getting her bachelors from Stanford and a masters from Oxford. Dull, dull, dull.

An illuminating graph from Nate Silver:

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Wait a second. All that power that you didn't like when someone else had it — you decided to keep it. Oh my God … you're Frodo!

Never again will any company — anyone — be allowed to drill in a location where they are incapable of dealing with the potential consequences of that drilling. … We will not play Russian Roulette with workers' lives, and we will not play Russion Roulette with irreversible environmental national disaster for the sake of some short-term income.

we will free ourselves as a nation, once and for all from the grip of this industry that has lied to us as much as it has exploited us as much as it has befouled us with its toxic effluent.

The poster boy, of course, is Congressman Joe Barton, who apologized to BP's president for the “shakedown” of Obama getting BP to put $20 billion in escrow to pay claims. (This is great, BTW. It should head off the legal song-and-dance Exxon did with the Valdez. And while the size of the fund is larger, the general idea is no different than what the Bush administration did in other cases.)

21 years after the Exxon Valdez, a report says: “only 14 percent of the oil was removed during cleanup operations” and “the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely.”

[The Constitution's] language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, all together, all at once.

To [the Plessy] generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery to make it look unexceptional by contrast. As a consequence, the judges of 1954 found a meaning in segregating the races by law that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see. That meaning is not captured by descriptions of physically identical schools or physically identical railroad cars. The meaning of facts arises elsewhere, and its judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own. Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. [Emphasis added.] And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race.

The Roberts Court has, consistently and intentionally, protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans.

So unless you want to get a late-term abortion, burn a flag in the town square, or get federal funding for your pornographic artwork, you really don’t need to worry about what the Supreme Court is up to. … By defining the terms of constitutional debate such that it doesn’t involve the lives of ordinary people, conservatives have disconnected Americans from their legal system. And that leaves room for lots of shenanigans. 

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral. 

Drat on Chris Kelly for spoiling Glenn Beck's new novel. Apparently, Glenn took somebody else's bad novel and did a liberal/conservative flip on it. The original author gets a thank-you.

Carefully cropped and mis-captioned photos, spliced-together audio tapes … Adam Greenhouse and Nora Barrows-Friedman report on “Israel's campaign to spin the attack, distort the facts and quell an outraged public” after the Gaza flotilla raid. Meanwhile, the global attention is causing Israel to loosen the most obviously non-military restrictions on Gaza imports.

The US discussion of Gaza and the Middle East in general includes very few Palestinian voices. Here's a Chicago Public Radio interview with Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi.

My article last week on the demise of the Big 12 Conference was premature. The next day Texas worked out a deal that made it more profitable to stay than to move to the Pac 10, so the ten-team Big 12 will go forward. If smaller Big-12 schools like Kansas and Iowa State ever wondered who was in charge, they know now.

An anonymous tea-party consultant tells his story in Playboy. And an Indiana Democrat concludes this from watching a local Tea Party meeting:

I came away with the conviction that this group was ignorant, annoying, and clueless, but not, ultimately, a threat to democracy, mainstream politics, or the Geek Squad.

Digby recalls the “Wanted for Treason” poster of JFK that was passed out in Dallas just before the assassination. Just change the photos, and it would look completely up-to-date.

You know who's in the Right's crosshairs now? The Girl Scouts.