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Victory Lap

March 29, 2010 – 1:38 pm
Winning takes talent. To repeat takes character. — John Wooden

In this week's Sift … I wanted to move on from health care, but the rest of the world didn't. So this week we focus on the aftermath of a contentious struggle.

  • The Democrats: “Yes We Did!” This week we saw something we haven't seen in a long time: Democrats unapologetic about getting what they wanted. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, and a little wondering why things can't be like this more often.
  • The Republicans: Repeal and Judicial Activism. Now who's counting on unelected judges to legislate from the bench? And Phil Gramm explains the difference between liberal and conservative approaches to health care.
  • Violent Rhetoric and Violent Action. Right-wing anger took a violent turn, though not a deadly one yet. Is it too much to ask Republican leaders to just say no?
  • No Persians Need Apply. The WaPo's slimy criticism of Christiane Amanpour.
  • Short Notes. The Onion achieves universal news parody, but still can't outdo the Texas Board of Education. Scott Brown nominates Rachel Maddow to run against him. Sarah Palin seems not to know who the Founding Fathers are. How I got David Frum fired. And more.
The Democrats: “Yes We Did!”

President Obama is a basketball player, so he knows: When you break the other team's full-court press and get the ball across the half-court line, you don't just sigh in relief and wait for the defense to re-set. No, you take advantage of their gamble by going straight to the basket.

That's what he was doing in Iowa Thursday. (Highlight video here.) The heavy lifting was over and the final piece of the bill would pass Thursday evening. But he didn't let up. Instead, he started making the Republicans pay for their outrageous rhetoric and tactics:

There’s been plenty of fear-mongering, plenty of overheated rhetoric. You turn on the news, you’ll see the same folks are still shouting about there’s going to be an end of the world because this bill passed. (Laughter.) I’m not exaggerating. Leaders of the Republican Party, they called the passage of this bill “Armageddon.” (Laughter.) Armageddon. “End of freedom as we know it.”

So after I signed the bill, I looked around to see if there were any — (laughter) — asteroids falling or — (applause) — some cracks opening up in the Earth. (Laughter.) It turned out it was a nice day. (Laughter.) Birds were chirping. Folks were strolling down the Mall. People still have their doctors.

That's exactly the right tone. Don't try to trump the other side's ridiculous claims, laugh at them.

We would never have gotten this advantage if the bill hadn't passed. The Republicans could have kept up the nonsense and claimed that they deserved credit for averting Armageddon. Now they're like the preacher who promised his followers the end of the world on a date certain. The date has come and gone, and the world is still here.

The View From the Bleachers blog  and Bob Johnson on Daily Kos continue the mockery.

Will-I-Am's “Yes We Can” video gets updated with a hell-no-you-can't counterpoint from John Boehner.

What would the health-care debate had sounded like if both sides had tried to be reasonable? Probably like this conversation between Joshua Cohen and Brink Lindsey.

Sometimes a news host's ego eclipses the story. In this clip two months ago, Rep. Alan Grayson tells Chris Matthews exactly what is going to happen: The Democrats will pass a health-care bill using reconciliation in the Senate. Matthews not only doesn't believe Grayson, he berates, badgers, and attempts to humiliate him. Matthews accuses him of “pandering to the netroots” — lying, in other words, telling people like me what we want to hear even though he knows it won't happen.

Remember, this isn't Fox News, this is the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC.

The Republicans: Repeal and Judicial Activism
Friday's Wall Street Journal gave five Republican views of where to go from here. The most interesting is from Phil Gramm, who summed up the difference between Republican and Democratic health-care policy like this:

Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.

This quote is worth examining in some detail, because it really does capture the difference. Look at what's missing: First, to Gramm the problem is entirely cost; access doesn't matter. If people can't get coverage because of, say, pre-existing conditions, that's not Phil Gramm's problem. And meanwhile, during the decades-long struggle to control costs, tens of millions of Americans won't be able to afford coverage, and tens of thousands of them will die unnecessarily every year. But that's not Phil Gramm's problem either.

Now look at his cost-control choices. Both are variations on one idea: Somebody has to go without care. The only questions are who and how. Gramm thinks the who should be the people who have to scramble to meet a budget. He doesn't say that, but think it through: In his “system where costs matter” where else would savings come from?

Economizing on your health-care decisions is not like buying chicken instead of steak. It's more like buying the half-price dented can that might have botulism or eating the stuff in the refrigerator that is a little spoiled but probably still OK. Probably. It's a gamble, in other words. 

So you have a pain somewhere and your doctor says, “Probably it's nothing, but it could be cancer. We should do a test.” The test turns out to be expensive. In Phil Gramm's system, if you're rich you get the test, but otherwise you have to think: “Am I going to risk it?” A lot of cash-strapped people will take the risk rather than pay for the test, and some of them will die.

That's how Republicans cut costs: People die, but it's their own decision so it's OK. They gambled and lost. Not my problem. 

That's what it means to “empower families” in “a system where costs matter”: We'll push struggling families into gambling with their lives.

Here's the cost-control feature Gramm ignores: The system could be more efficient if the decision-making weren't so atomized. Think about vaccinations. A system-wide approach can wipe out a disease (like we almost did with smallpox and are trying to do with polio). That's a huge cost savings, but it takes a government mandate. 

An even better example is antibiotic-resistant hospital-bourne infections — a huge problem that costs billions and kills about 19,000 Americans every year. Individuals and families can't do much about it — my Dad picked up MRSA in a hospital after surgery this summer, and I don't see what we could have done differently. 

Well, there is one thing: We could have sent Dad to Norway for his surgery, because Norway (one of those “socialist” countries whose example is supposed to scare us) has MRSA pretty well whipped. They did it by cutting down the unnecessary use of antibiotics.  Fewer antibiotics in the environment means fewer chances for resistant bacteria to evolve. They don't cure MRSA any better than we do, but they prevent it.

The Dutch also control MRSA using a “search and destroy” strategy that tests everyone who enters a hospital. That, again, is a “socialist” solution: Most MRSA carriers never get sick and have no individual motivation to pay for a test, but you force tests on them anyway. It works.

Did I mention that Norwegians on average live two years longer than Americans? And that they spent $4763 per person on health care in 2007, compared to $7290 in the US? (For the Dutch it's 1.6 years and $3837.) Republican-style individual decision-making can't get you there; it just trades off cost against survival. To improve both you need a system-wide approach. You need to deal with the public health problems, not just the individual health problems.

Republican state attorney generals are filing suit to have the bill declared unconstitutional, because the Constitution does not empower the government to require people to buy private-market products like health insurance. There's really no precedent for such a ruling, but Republicans must be hoping that the conservative judicial activists on the Supreme Court will ignore precedent and rule based on their ideology, as they did in the Citizens United case or Bush v Gore.

As far as constitutionality and the Founders' intent goes, Joe Conason points out that George Washington signed a bill with an individual mandate. The Militia Act of 1792 requires each able-bodied male of military age to 

provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges …

The overall Republican narrative is that Obama is an extreme left-winger: socialist or even Marxist or totalitarian — like Stalin or Hitler. 

Health care has to be shoe-horned into that narrative, because Obamacare is almost entirely built from ideas that Republicans had back in the days when Republicans were sane. Senators old enough to have supported the 1993 Heritage Foundation plan — Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley and others — have been spinning wildly to explain why they now think that their old proposal is unconstitutional. Their defense seems to be that nobody worried about the Constitution back in 1993, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Grassley told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell: “I don't think anybody gave it much thought until three or four months ago.”

Mitt Romney has the even-harder problem of explaining why his 2006 Massachusetts health plan was good, but the Obama plan (basically just a bigger version of the same thing) is horrible. The difference he points to: His plan was bipartisan. Matt Yglesias responds: Obama's plan would have been bipartisan too if people like Romney had supported it.

I'll just tell you this, if this [health-care bill] passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented, I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica.

Buh-bye Rush. Send us a card. BTW: Costa Rica is a good choice. They have universal health care and they let foreigners buy in cheaply. They also have no armed forces, so you never have to worry about some crazy president starting a war for no reason. You'll love it.

The Congressman who shouted “baby killer” at Bart Stupak has been identified: Republican Randy Neugebauer of Texas. He has apologized to Stupak, but is also raising money based on his outburst.

Violent Rhetoric and Violent Action
Another reason to respond with humor rather than anger is that the anger is already out of hand.
Passage of health-care reform sparked a wave of vandalism against Democrats in Congress: broken windows at several congressional offices, and (a little bit more scary) a cut gas line at a house that right-wingers thought belonged to a Democratic Congressman but actually belonged to his brother. One Missouri Democrat found a coffin outside his home.
Rachel Maddow led with this story two nights in a row. Only in retrospect will we know whether that was prescient or an over-reaction. If this spirals up to an Oklahoma City bombing or a JFK assassination, it was prescient. If occasional vandalism is the extent of it, Rachel (and a few other people on the Left) over-reacted.
Here's what is beyond dispute: 
  • Conservatives like to use violent metaphors in their rhetoric. So Sarah Palin talks about “reloading” and puts up a map with “targeted” congressional districts in crosshairs. (Even the View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck — inexplicably left off my list of blonde conservative female pundits last week — described this as “despicable“.) Democrats also use fighting metaphors, but usually stay away from more graphic ones involving weapons or military tactics.
  • In this era, right-wing crazies are more violent than left-wing crazies. That hasn't always been true, but it has for a few decades now. If there are left-wing militias groups training for revolution, I haven't seen them. Lefties don't shoot people in churches (not just here, but here), and we aren't making heroes of the people who do. We haven't dive-bombed offices we don't like or shot up museums lately.
What's at issue is the connection between metaphoric violence and physical violence. A recent NYT article minimized the relationship. While admitting the possibility of riling up an occasional “lone wolf”, Benedict Carey says:

the psychological distance between talk and action — between fantasizing about even so much as brick heaving and actually doing it — is far larger for a typical, peaceable citizen than many assume. 

Still, Republican leaders haven't just just pooh-poohed the connection, they've leaned towards justifying the violence. Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, responded to the IRS kamikaze by repeating his criticisms of the IRS. And Scott Brown said, “No one likes paying taxes.” John Boehner did say that violence was “unacceptable”, but only after sympathizing with the motives of those who threaten:

I know many Americans are angry over this health care bill, and that Washington Democrats just aren't listening

Eric Cantor tried to turn the attack around: He accused Democrats of “fanning the flames” by complaining about the threats against them. And he claimed (falsely, as it turned out, reminding some bloggers of Ashley Todd) that his offices had been targeted too. Democrats offered a vanilla bipartisan civility agreement, which Republican leaders refused to sign.
Digby nails this behavior: It's a wife-beater mindset. Democrats have been “asking for it” by daring to vote for something they believe in and carrying out the platform they ran on. 

It's hard not to connect violence with beliefs that would justify a violent response. Several people have asked me about the Harris online poll with bizarre results. 41% of the Republicans answering the poll say they believe Obama “wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers.” 24% even agree that “He may be the Anti-Christ.” I take this with a grain of salt because, as Newsweek points out, the poll design was virtually guaranteed to exaggerate agreement.

No Persians Need Apply

ABC announced that veteran CNN international reporter Christiane Amanpour will be the new host of its Sunday-morning show “This Week”, starting in August. She replaces George Stephanopoulos, who has moved on to “Good Morning America”.

What makes a good anchor for an interview-and-commentary show is highly subjective, so it's not surprising that people have many reactions to this announcement. But the column WaPo's TV critic Tom Shales wrote has some ugly undercurrents that Glenn Greenwald noticed and brought to the surface. Shales first observes:

Supporters of Israel have more than once charged Amanpour with bias against that country and its policies.

Fair enough, though supporters of anything have a tendency to see accurate reporting as bias against them. But then the next paragraph begins:

Amanpour grew up in Great Britain and Iran. Her family fled Tehran in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution, when she was college age. She has steadfastly rejected claims about her objectivity

To understand why Glenn calls this “slimy”, flip it around. The job's other major candidate was Jake Tapper. How slimy would it be to raise unsubstantiated questions about a pro-Israel bias and then immediately mention Trapper's ethnic background (Jewish)? 

If somebody wants to argue that Amanpour is anti-Israel, fine: Cite examples. Give evidence. But in America a reporter's ethnicity is not evidence of bias.

Short Notes
The Onion parodies every cable-news story simultaneously in Breaking News: Some Bullshit is Happening Somewhere. 

It  also demonstrates how hard parodying the Right is these days. Their list of changes to the Texas textbooks doesn't sound any crazier than the real ones. Extra credit question: Is this from the Onion or the real Texas standards?

A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.

New Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown has been trying to raise funds based on the false rumor that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow (who lives in Massachusetts) is going to run against him — a rumor he never bothered to check out by calling her. Since her on-air denial, he has not backed off, telling a talk-radio host “Bring her on.” (To which Rachel says: “Bring what on?”) He also hasn't returned her calls or responded to her invitation to come on her show. Rachel responds:

I guess Scott Brown is going to be one of the politicians who makes stuff up to raise money instead of dealing with real issues.

Since my father-in-law went to a nursing home, my wife has been getting his mail. So I have read Sarah Palin's latest fund-raising letter. It's strikingly vacuous, even for her: She favors “the ideals of our Founding Fathers” but doesn't say what any of them are. She's against “Liberal politicians … trying to re-write the U.S. Constitution” but doesn't say what part is being rewritten or by whom. She's also against “politicians who want to take away our basic rights” … whatever they are.

I'm reminded of an Onion article I've linked to before: Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.

The letter gets a little confusing when Sarah endorses “a return to the values our Founding Fathers fought and died for” since the Founders are usually considered to be the people who survived the Revolution long enough to write the Constitution or otherwise participate in the early days of the Republic. (As far as I know, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin all died in their beds.) But my confusion comes from over-thinking. This is just evolution at work: Pieces of one buzz-phrase mate with another to produce something new.

Gee, it's like conservatives read the Sift or something. Last week I pointed to David Frum as a conservative who was making sense. Thursday he lost his job as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. (Most complete coverage here.)

Best Frum quote: “Republicans originally thought Fox News worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

It's 90 minutes long — an hour of talk and a half-hour of questions — so don't get started if you don't have some time, but Rick Perlstein's talk at Vanderbilt last Monday is very insightful and interesting. Perlstein is a historian (author of Nixonland), and he's describing his historical model of how transformational presidents — FDR, Reagan — did it. He doesn't think Obama is following that path.

The contrast between today's tea-party Republicans and Republicans from not-so-long-ago came out Saturday on Mike Huckabee's show. Huckabee was trying to get James Baker, Chief of Staff and Secretary of State in the original Bush administration, to condemn Obama's handling of the Israeli settlement issue. Baker refused to run with the Israel-is-always-right ball, and instead gave Huckabee a history lesson.

Another long-term price of the second Bush administration's follies: British lawmakers want to end the “special relationship” that has let the U.S. call the shots in Britain's foreign policy.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Party Like It’s 1935

March 22, 2010 – 3:33 pm
Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.  — Franklin Roosevelt

In this week's Sift:

  • Did We Win? President Obama might sign a health-care reform bill as early as tomorrow. The Senate still has some stuff to fix, but reform is going to be a reality. After a yearlong process of argument and compromise, what should we make of the final product? First, don't think of it as a final product.
  • Next Up, Financial Reform. So far, we've done remarkably little to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown. This is going to take more than one Sift to cover, but let's get started.
  • Short Notes. My talk about the Sift. Subway-adapted stray dogs. Jon Stewart does a great Glenn Beck imitation, while Stephen Colbert nominates Beck for pope. Strife on the Right. Why dark matter is a liberal plot. Seven years in Iraq. And more.
Did We Win?
The Senate health care bill passed the House late Sunday night 219-212, with no Republican yes-votes. The process is not completely over, because the House also passed “fixes” to the bill (which the Senate will now consider through the reconciliation process that blocks a filibuster), and both bills must then be signed by President Obama. But this was the key step. Obama's signature is a foregone conclusion, which means that some kind of health reform will now become law. Probably the Senate will follow through on the fixes, and we'll wind up with something close to what Obama put forward a few weeks ago.
Does that mean liberals won?
This debate has been going on for more than a year now. From the outset, the liberal idea of a single-payer system (Medicare for everybody) was off the table, despite the fact that it would almost certainly work better. (France and Germany have single-payer systems. They get better outcomes for half to 2/3rds of the per-person cost we pay.) For much of the year it looked like we might get a public option, a Medicare-like system to compete with private insurance companies, but we didn't.
The details of the bill picked up further conservative compromises along the way (in exchange for no Republican votes) but the outline stayed close to the system Mitt Romney set up in Massachusetts: an expansion of Medicaid to cover more of the working poor, a mandate that everybody else buy private insurance (with the help of sliding-scale government subsidies for much of the working class), and state-by-state exchanges where individuals can buy policies at rates similar to what group policies cost, without lifetime limits on benefits or the possibility that they will be excluded for pre-existing conditions.
A single-payer system might have put health-insurance companies out of business and a public option would have limited their profitability, so they come out well. (The price of UNH stock roughly tracks the upward path of the Dow Jones average over the past year, beating it slightly.) The CBO estimates that 23 million will remain uninsured, about a third of them illegal aliens. Many of the rest would become eligible for Medicare if they became seriously ill.
So did we win?
With all the compromises and might-have-beens, it's easy to lose sight of the Big Picture, but yes, we won. The Right's government-takeover rhetoric was always overblown, but this bill is an important step in establishing the social principle that the health-care system is the government's responsibility. The market will continue to play a major role in health care, but it will be a tool that works within a system defined by the political process, rather than the ultimate definer and implementer of all policy.
That principle is very important looking forward, because the status quo was not sustainable much longer. American health care is half again as expensive as most other wealthy countries', and getting worse. We will have to come up with ways to control costs. In a market-defined system, costs would be controlled by letting poor people die. You can dress it up, but fundamentally that's what it would come down to. In the kind of system the Right wanted, less affluent families would always be tempted to gamble: Maybe that ache means nothing; maybe Susie's cough will go away on its own. Most of the time the gamble would be won, but when it was lost people would die.
Now we're going to have to focus on controlling costs at the system level. That won't be easy, but the other countries get it done and we will too.
It's not a ride-off-into-the-sunset victory. The insurance companies will find ways to abuse this system, and the hard work of controlling costs without killing poor people (or anybody) is still to come. But we're headed in the right direction. Think of all the tinkering Social Security has needed over the decades, and still needs. 1935 was just the beginning, not the end.

It's not nearly as momentous as the passage of Medicare in 1965 and won't fundamentally alter how Americans think about social safety nets. But the passage of Obama's health care reform bill is the biggest thing Congress has done in decades, and has enormous political significance for the future.

On the politics of this bill, David Axelrod sums up my thinking:

This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass. They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition, “We don’t think you should be covered.”

If the bill didn't pass, then Democrats could be portrayed not only as sinister, but ineffective as well. An able villain earns a grudging respect, but a bumbling one deserves only contempt. And the new Obama voters who turned out in 2008 would have learned that the cynics were right — voting doesn't change things.

Now Obama inherits a frame that benefitted Bush: You may not agree with him, but he has stuck by his beliefs and gotten something started. Now the country needs to make it work.

If the Republicans do make repealing healthcare reform the centerpiece of their 2010 campaign, it won't be the first time they've tried this tactic. Pledging to repeal Social Security is how Alf Landon defeated FDR in 1936 … in Maine and Vermont. The other 46 states and 523 electoral votes went for Roosevelt.

The final days of the health-care debate brought more of the kinds of deceptions we've been seeing all along. There was, for example, the survey supposedly conducted by the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in which 46% of primary care doctors said that reform might cause them to quit.
Except … it wasn't the NEJM. The survey was published in a somewhat less prestigious publication: a free newsletter called Recruiting Physicians Today. It was conducted by a medical recruitment firm, which claimed that the survey established the increased need for medical recruitment firms after reform passes. So: a firm you never heard of published a survey in a free newsletter claiming that its services would soon be in high demand. Very newsworthy.
Nonetheless, this falsely-attributed “NEJM survey” was all over Fox News for most of a day.
Another fraud was the Democratic strategy memo that Republicans tried to make an issue of. This C-SPAN exchange is classic, as Rep. Weiner of New York calls out the Republican representative who just referred to the memo on the floor of the House. No one seems to know where this purported memo came from or who wrote it, but that didn't stop Politico and other news outlets from publishing it. And once they have, of course, the Republican leadership can blame the press for any misinformation.

One of the more interesting stories in the closing days of the health-care debate has been the struggle between single-issue anti-abortion Catholics and Catholics who recall Matthew 25:31-46. (“I was sick and you looked after me.”) 

On March 11, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement to be inserted into church bulletins. It denounced “those who insist on reversing widely supported policies against federal funding of abortion and plans which include abortion” and asked Catholics to call their representatives in Congress. USCCB president Cardinal Francis George followed up on Monday with this judgment:

the flaws [of the bill] are so fundamental that they vitiate the good that the bill intends to promote. 

In a rare move, the leaders of religious orders representing 59,000 American nuns undercut the bishops in a letter sent to members of Congress. It lists the virtues of the bill, and says:

despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions.

The head of the Association for Catholic Hospitals (also a nun) has come out for the bill too. I'm not sure how Catholics are reacting, but from the outside the bishops look like old bachelors for whom female health is a theological abstraction.

One thing you have to give the anti-health-care protestors, they stayed classy. Here they yell racial and sexual insults at congressmen, and here they humiliate a man with Parkinson's. But why should they show more restraint than members of Congress, one of whom yelled “baby killer!” at Bart Stupak on the floor of the House after Stupak's last-minute abortion compromise.

That's the point missing from all the Bush-critics-were-crazy-too articles: Leading Democrats were embarrassed by the more extreme Bush critics (like the Bush-knew-about-9-11 conspiracy theorists) and did their best to distance themselves. But elected Republicans won't distance themselves from the crazies, and many urge them on. And the supposedly liberal media never fanned the flames of craziness the way Fox News does now.

Speaking of the Stupak compromise, it appears to be a face-saving way to resolve a trumped-up non-issue. The nuns were right: The health-care bill never provided the federal funds for elective abortion that critics claimed. So an executive order re-iterating that no federal funds will go for elective abortions has no real consequences.

Salon's Alex Koppelman nominates a Michelle Bachman – Steve King article on Politico for worst op-ed ever. The lowest of its many low moments is when it feeds the bizarre keep-government-away-from-my-Medicare notion:

Obamacare cuts a half-trillion dollars in health care for seniors to lay the foundation for socialized medicine.

This isn't some confused protester with a sign; this is two members of Congress purporting to defend Medicare against socialized medicine. In writing.

I'm often asked if I find any reasonable conservatives to listen to. Well, David Frum is making a lot of sense:

Some [Republican] leaders were trapped [on health care]. They were trapped by voices in the media that revved the Republican base into a frenzy that made dealing impossible. I mean, you can’t negotiate with Adolf Hitler, and if the President is Adolf Hitler, then obviously you can’t negotiate with him.

Next Up: Financial Reform
The health-care debate has taken up all the airtime, but there's also that little question of how not to repeat 2008's financial meltdown. Up until now I've been negligent in covering this topic, mostly because I haven't found good articles to link to.

I promise to do better. Let's start by framing the problem that re-regulation needs to solve: De-regulation was always a little bit of a myth, because everyone knew that if things got bad enough the government would have to step in, as it ultimately did. So we had the worst of both worlds: A fictitious free market continued as long as times were good, but the taxpayers were left holding the bag when times turned bad. 

I find this metaphor useful: Imagine a gambler with a bagful of somebody else's chips. If he wins he keeps the winnings, but if he loses they weren't his chips anyway. That's the situation that the big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs were in. So naturally they made big risky bets, and when those bets paid off they took home a lot of money. When the bets went bad, the government bailed them out.

It would be satisfying to send people to jail for this. But that's probably impossible, because there's no meta-law against taking advantage of laws that Congress has rigged in your favor. There's not even a law against asking Congress to rig laws in your favor in exchange for your support, as long as the quid-pro-quos aren't too explicit. So the best we can reasonably hope for is to write a better set of laws this time and have somebody actually enforce them. That may even be more than we can reasonably hope for.

The basic idea of re-regulation ought to be this: The bigger a financial institution gets, the more regulated it is, and the fewer risks it is allowed to take. If an institution is truly too big to fail, it should be also be too big to take risks.

Bankers wouldn't like to be limited like that, and so they'd be motivated to split companies up when they got close to regulatory limits.

After some Googling around and other stuff that passes for research, it looks like the best online source for keeping track of this stuff is a blog called Naked Capitalism. In this post, for example, guest blogger Frank Partnoy examines the examiner's report on the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and concludes:

The Valuation section is 500 pages of utterly terrifying reading. It shows that, even eighteen months after Lehman’s collapse, no one – not the bankruptcy examiner, not Lehman’s internal valuation experts, not Ernst and Young, and certainly not the regulators – could figure out what many of Lehman’s assets and liabilities were worth. … When the examiner compared Lehman’s marks on these lower tranches to more reliable valuation estimates, it found that “the prices estimated for the C and D tranches of Ceago securities are approximately one‐thirtieth of the price reported by Lehman. (pages 560-61) One thirtieth? These valuations weren’t even close.

Jon Stewart gives a pretty good explanation of how the meltdown happened. And of course there's always the classic Bird and Fortune routine from the early stages of the real estate bubble.

Lawrence Lessig attends a conference on re-regulation and concludes that everyone (except Elizabeth Warren) is still in denial about the real problem: the way our political system is financed.

as expert after expert demonstrated, practically every one of the design flaws that led to the collapse of the past few years remains essentially unchanged within our financial system still. … Wall Street continues unchanged because the Congress that would change it is already shuttling to Wall Street fundraisers. Both parties are already pandering to this power, so they can … fund the next cycle of campaigns.

Short Notes

The text of my talk about this blog, Sifting the News, is online now.

In Moscow, the stray dogs have learned how to use the subway. I know it sounds like the start of a joke, but would ABC News lie about something like that?
Conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel turned on Sean Hannity this week, charging that his fund-raising for Freedom Alliance (a charity that is supposed to benefit wounded veterans and the children of soldiers killed in combat)  is “a huge scam”. David Frum was one of the few conservatives that didn't either ignore the story or reflexively jump to Hannity's defense, but now his FrumForum says there's nothing to it either.

No surprise, given some of the outlandish things Schlussel has said about liberals. But if conservatives are going to start eating their own, I'll happily pull up a chair and pop some corn.

And I know I shouldn't be criticizing female bloggers and pundits based on their appearance, but is there a factory somewhere that churns out conservative blondes? There's Schlussel, Ann Coulter, Megan Kelly, Laura Ingraham, Liz Cheney, Gretchen Carlson, and I could probably go on. Did Michelle Malkin have to get a waver or was she grandmothered in?

Jon Stewart was great the other time he did a Glenn Beck impersonation, but Thursday night was the best yet. 

And let's not overlook Stephen Colbert's response to Beck's attack on “social justice” churches. He interviews Jesuit Father Jim Martin, and asks the question we all wonder about: “If I help the poor, what's in it for me?” Colbert also asks Father Martin to speculate on Beck as a future pope, noting that “he seems so comfortable telling Catholics what to do.”

We all know that they crash-test cars, but I'd never thought about crash-testing a helicopter.

President Obama went on Fox News Wednesday, and was treated with an unprecedented level of disrespect by interviewer Bret Baier, who persistently interrupted and talked over him. Media Matters compares Baier's Obama interview with his Bush interview, where he asked such stinging questions as “What are you reading now?”

I'm sure you already knew that evolution and global warming are hoaxes put out by the evil liberal scientific community, but I'll bet they slipped dark matter right past you. Have no fear, the Conservapedia (the conservative movement's answer to the hopelessly liberal Wikipedia) is on the case. It has noted that a new set of experiments “may disprove liberal claims that 'dark matter' comprises 25% of the universe.”

Steven Andrew is puzzled by how dark matter became a liberal/conservative thing, writing:

I'm aware of no split in the cosmology community on Dark Matter vs. [Modified Newtonian Dynamics] that falls neatly across a progressive-conservative axis (Probably because there isn't one). 

But that's because he hasn't read the Conservapedia article on dark matter. Without dark matter, you see, there are cosmological conundrums that require the direct intervention of God. So dark matter is just one more pitiful attempt by liberal scientists to hide the holes in their godless universe.

Either that, or it's a government takeover of 25% of the universe.

Brave New Films commemorates the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

The NYT public editor reviews its coverage of the ACORN-pimp video, finds a number of failings in the Times' coverage (all damaging to ACORN), and then concludes:

It remains a fascinating story. To conservatives, Acorn is virtually a criminal organization that was guilty of extensive voter registration fraud in 2008. To its supporters, Acorn is a community service organization that has helped millions of disadvantaged Americans by organizing to confront powerful institutions like banks and developers.

If only our universe contained “facts” that could be ascertained by “reporters”. Then newspapers could spread knowledge rather than just repeat opinions from both sides.

John King's new show on CNN starts tonight. It will include Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative blog RedState. This was supposed to be a “straight news show” about which King has commented:

I think what is troubling in part of our business is you have people on news shows who start the conversation with a bias.

Erickson, who has twittered that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is a “goat-fucking child molestor” and characterized Michelle Obama as a “marxist harpy” should fit right in with that no-bias agenda.

Conservatives think it's unpatriotic to agree with a foreign country in a dispute with the U.S. government — unless there's a Democratic administration and the country is Israel.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Siding With the Oppressor

March 15, 2010 – 2:55 pm

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

In this week's Sift:

  • Is Justice a Christian Value? Glenn Beck thinks not. Jim Wallis is trying to call him to account.
  • “Under God” Yet Again. Michael Newdow's first suit against the Pledge of Allegiance made it to the Supreme Court, where it got thrown out for procedural reasons. Now he's back.
  • Richistan. Do the rich really live in another country? Robert Frank and Paul Krugman show us the new Gilded Age from two different angles.
  • Short Notes. A corporation announces that it is running for Congress. What corporate personhood might do to human personhood. The Cheney government in exile. Two creative ideas for avoiding gender discrimination. Bye-bye James Dobson. Why don't Republican sex scandals stick? Plainfield, NH takes a plain stand on same-sex marriage. Bachman keeps calling for revolution. Lack of health insurance really does kill people. You still suck at Photoshop. And more.
Is Justice a Christian Value?
Glenn Beck and the don't-call-me-liberal evangelical leader Jim Wallis (author of God's Politics) are having a throw-down. It started with Beck urging his listeners to leave churches that preach “social justice” because those are codes words used by the Communists and Nazis.

Wallis responded with a blog post saying:

Beck says Christians should leave their social justice churches, so I say Christians should leave Glenn Beck. I don’t know if Beck is just strange, just trying to be controversial, or just trying to make money. But in any case, what he has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith, and Christians should no longer watch his show.

Jerry Falwell Jr. (president of Liberty University, which was founded by his father, the late Jerry Falwell) came in on Beck's side. In a great piece of anachronism, Falwell said that Jesus wasn't interested in politics:

Jesus taught that we should give to the poor and support widows, but he never said that we should elect a government that would take money from our neighbor's hand and give it to the poor.

Of course, if Jesus had talked about elections, no one would have known what he was talking about, because King Herod and Pontius Pilate didn't hold elections. So it makes just as much sense to claim that Jesus did call for electing such a government, but the disciples were too confused to write it down.

Wallis wants to debate the issue on Beck's show. Using my amazing prophetic powers, I foresee that this is not going to happen.

In another week or two I'm going to review Jeff Sharlet's The Family, which highlights this very issue. Everybody agrees that Jesus preached obedience to certain ethical principles. But there are two different ways to view this. Jim Wallis' branch of Christianity pictures the virtue as lying in the ethical principles, while Glenn Beck's branch pictures the virtue as lying in the obedience.

The two conflict when you start to talk about re-making the social and economic order in accordance with Christian ethical principles, because in order to do that, you have to disobey the current Powers That Be.

Full disclosure: I've already taken a position on this issue. I think there is a fundamental injustice at the root of our property system, and that individual charity is not sufficient to fix it. What's more, Beck's hero Thomas Paine agrees with me — as I explained at Chapel Hill last fall in a sermon called Who Owns the World?

“Under God”, Yet Again
Michael Newdow is back with another suit against including under God in the Pledge of Allegiance. His previous suit reached the Supreme Court in 2002, only to be dismissed on procedural grounds that didn't touch the underlying issue of whether the current Pledge violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Friday, his new suit lost on the appellate level, after having won at the district level. Probably the whole thing is headed for the Supremes again.

I wasn't surprised that Newdow lost 2-1, but I was disappointed in the reasoning of the majority opinion. 

The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded and for which we continue to strive: one Nation under God—the Founding Fathers’ belief that the people of this nation are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights

… The Pledge reflects many beliefs held by the Founding Fathers of this country—the same men who authored the Establishment Clause—including the belief that it is the people who should and do hold the power, not the government. They believed that the people derive their most important rights, not from the government, but from God:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration of Independence, 1 U.S.C. § XLIII (1776) (emphasis added).

The Founders did not see these two ideas— that individuals possessed certain God-given rights which no government can take away, and that we do not want our nation to establish a religion—as being in conflict.

The majority wants to consider the Pledge recitation as a whole, and not the specific phrase under God, which was added to the Pledge by Congress in 1954. (In God we trust became the national motto two years later, though it had appeared on money as early as the Civil War.) As a whole, the majority opinion sees the recitation as having a patriotic purpose, not a religious one. And they imply that finding for Newdow and removing under God from the Pledge would somehow infringe the rights of believers.

this case presents a familiar dilemma in our pluralistic society—how to balance conflicting interests when one group wants to do something for patriotic reasons that another groups finds offensive to its religious (or atheistic) beliefs.

I could imagine a reasonable defense of under God, but this isn't it. This is more of a Texas-Education-Commission position than something I would expect from an appellate court. The original Pledge, without under God, is just as patriotic as the current Pledge. So the majority is really claiming that Congress can insert bits of religious ritual into patriotic observances, as long as the overall character remains patriotic.

I don't see how anyone can argue with Judge Stephen Reinhardt's dissent:

Were the majority to engage seriously with the history of the Pledge, it would be compelled to recognize beyond any doubt that the words “under God” were inserted with the explicit and deliberate intention of endorsing a particular religious belief, of compelling nonadherents to that belief to pronounce the belief publicly or be labeled un-American, and of instilling the particular religious view in America’s youth through daily indoctrination in the public schools.

Here's my question: Does under God serve any purpose other than rubbing atheists' and polytheists' noses in the dirt? Having mindlessly recited the Pledge many times while growing up, I doubt it changes any child's theology. And if you doubt that it does rub noses in the dirt, try saying the Pledge with other phases, like under the gods or under Goddess or under no God.

To take that thought experiment one step further, picture this: It's 100 A.D. and Christianity is just starting to take off. So the Emperor Trajan decrees that all children must start their day by reciting a pledge that Rome is “one Empire, under the gods”. If you're a Christian, do you let your children say it?
Richistan
I recently finished the book Richistan by Robert Frank. Frank is the WSJ's reporter on the lifestyles of the rich and famous, who have become such a closed and cut-off society that Frank regards them as a country unto themselves (hence the title). The book is from 2007, so pre-crash and a little out of date. But it's a quick read and a lot of fun.

I bring it up because it makes a nice pair with Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, also from 2007. They report the same story from two different angles. The story is that vast American fortunes were built during the Gilded Age (late 19th century), but then the New Deal changed government policies in a way that discouraged the creation of new fortunes and diminished the ones that already existed. In the 60s and 70s, the rich were largely Old Money and demoralized — it wasn't cool to flaunt your wealth. But policies changed with Ronald Reagan, and a new Gilded Age started. Inequality grew, new fortunes were made, and the rich are now ascendent again — you can't be too rich or too ostentatious about flaunting it.

Krugman tells this story from a macro-economic view, with graphs and statistics. Frank gives you the ground-level view, interviewing rich people and showing how the culture of Richistan has changed in the last few decades. But it's the same story.
Short Notes
Yesterday I gave a talk about how and why I do the Sift, and I promised people a link to a text version. Preparing the text has turned out to take more time than I have, given that I'm putting out the Sift today, so that link will have to wait until next week.
In a great response to the Supreme Court's corporate-personhood decision in the Citizens United case, Murray Hill, Inc. has announced that it is running for Congress: “Now that democracy is truly for sale, Murray Hill is offering top dollar.”

I look at corporate personhood from a more spiritual perspective in my latest UU World column. I pull back and look at what the long-term increase in corporate power has been doing to us as people. I find it not quite infantilizing, but certainly toddlerizing:

As corporations’ power to shape our society increases, I expect to see my toddlerization increase as well. The portion of my life in which I am expected, encouraged, or even allowed to act like an adult will continue to shrink—slowly, perhaps even invisibly, on a day-to-day basis. But decade-to-decade, how will it change me? Generation-to-generation, how will it change the human race? 

The Texas Education Board marches on, approving new fundamentalist-conservative standards in social studies.

Tired of men staring at your chest instead of looking you in the eye? Try this.

Or, if you believe that being a woman is holding you back in your web-based business … just take a man's name. Who's going to know?

It's been a while since I've linked to an episode of You Suck at Photoshop. Donny explains the Vanishing Point tool, because we all need to vanish sometimes.

Every now and then David Brooks does more than repeat conservative talking points:

Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

New York magazine has a profile of “The Cheney Government in Exile” — including Liz Cheney's political prospects.

Polls are turning in the Democrats' direction on health care.

Tom Toles comments on passing health care reform by majority vote.

In the wake of Eric Massa's resignation, Matt Yglesias wonders why John Ensign is still in office.  And Steve Benen examines the larger point that Republican sex scandals don't stick.

It's not just scandals, it's family values in general: Rhetoric replaces behavior. It's hard to imagine, say, a Democrat with multiple divorces being discussed as a viable presidential candidate, as Newt Gingrich is and Rudi Giuliani was last time around. And you'll never convince Palin fans that she wasn't persecuted, but it's just unimaginable that an little-known Democratic VP candidate could have survived the revelation of an unmarried pregnant teen-age daughter.

It looks like we won't have James Dobson to kick around any more.

Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to balance the budget by slowly throttling Medicare (while cutting rich people's taxes and raising everybody else's) may have one other problem: It doesn't balance the budget.

It's an article of faith among the anti-gay-marriage crowd that the New Hampshire legislature overstepped itself by allowing same-sex marriage in this state. They're sure the people don't want it, so they started a movement called “Let New Hampshire Vote” to get local town meetings to pass a warrant saying:

The citizens of New Hampshire should be allowed to vote on an amendment to the New Hampshire Constitution that defines “marriage”.

Well, that article came up in the small town of Plainfield, but it got amended so that instead Plainfield will write a letter to the governor and legislature

commending them for passing and signing into law legislation affirming marriage equality for all New Hampshire residents.

The commendation passed 185-40. The people of Plainfield have spoken.

Rep. Michele Bachman says that passing health care reform through the reconciliation process (which is already of mis-statement of the Democrats' plan, as I explained two weeks ago) is “illegitimate” and says “We don't have to follow a bill that isn't law.” Because, as we all know, government-mandated health care is the end of freedom in America. If we sit still for it, we'll become one of those communist dictatorships like Canada.

Speaking of Canada, Sarah Palin reveals that when she was a girl, her family used to cross the border to get health care in Canada. No wonder she's so opposed to “socialism”, having seen it close-up like that.

Johann Hari in the Nation writes a strong indictment of mainstream environmental groups. Quoting Christine MacDonald, author of Green, Inc.:

Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes; they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them.

 A recent article in Atlantic suggested that insuring the uninsured might not save lives. Harvard Professor J. Michael Williams looks at a more complete body of evidence and concludes this about the number of lives that universal health care could save each year:

A rigorous body of research tells us the answer is many, probably thousands if not tens of thousands.

Slate reviews Diane Ravitch's book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I get the impression of an author who would love to have an ax to grind, but can't find one that's convincing to her. (I may have to read this book.)

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Flashbacks

March 8, 2010 – 1:28 pm
I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five [people] that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department. — Senator Joseph McCarthy, 9 February 1950

So who did President Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder hire? Nine lawyers who represented or advocated for terrorist detainees. Who are these government officials? Eric Holder will only name two. Why the secrecy behind the other seven? Whose values do they share? Tell Eric Holder: Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al Qaeda 7. — from “Who Are the Al Qaeda Seven?” video by Liz Cheney's “Keep America Safe”, 2 March 2010

In this week's Sift:

  • The Party that George Built. Conservative writer Jonathan Rauch uncovers the original source of today's Republican message: Not Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater, but George Wallace. (Except that “racism … is marginal in today's GOP.” Thanks for clearing that up, Jonathan.)
  • The Power of One Senator. Jim Bunning blocking an important piece of legislation is just the latest example of how much power a lone senator can wield. How does that work exactly?
  • Health Care and Public Opinion. Republicans are shocked that President Obama would continue pushing a bill that polls badly. But ignoring the polls was a virtue when Bush was president. Or, as Dick Cheney summed it up: “So?”
  • Changing the Tone. Those who say Obama hasn't changed the tone in Washington have forgotten what the old tone was. Liz Cheney reminds them.
  • Short Notes. Breaking news from Tom Friedman: Intel execs want tax breaks and subsidies. Obama gets a midnight visit from all the SNL presidents. National Grammar Day. Creationists join up with global-warming deniers. Stephen Colbert pimps up an interview with Sean Hannity. Same-sex marriage is legal in two more North American capitals. And more.
The Party That George Built
An important article in the National Journal discusses George W., the guy nobody talks about any more, the one who made the Republican Party what it is today. No, not George W. Bush — George Wallace. 

In It's George Wallace's GOP Now, conservative Jonathan Rauch cuts “the history of the modern Republican Party” down to one sentence:

Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller got into an argument and George Wallace won.

What disturbs Rauch is that Wallace was not a conservative at all, but rather a “right-wing populist”. He describes Wallace as exploiting “a deep sense of grievance” against “elites”, but notes that

What Wallace did not do was frame a coherent program or governing philosophy.

He cites parallels between Wallace's rhetoric and Sarah Palin's, while noting that Palin is typical of today's GOP. 

like Wallace and his supporters 40 years ago, today's conservative populists are long on anger and short on coherence. For Wallace, small-government rhetoric was a trope, not a workable agenda. The same is true of his Republican heirs today, who insist that spending cuts alone, without tax increases, will restore fiscal balance but who have not proposed anywhere near enough spending cuts, primarily because they can't.

Two comments: First, this rhetoric works because most voters have a very distorted idea of what the government spends money on. Angry tea-partiers would happily cut foreign aid to countries that hate us, bureaucrats who do nothing all day, social services to illegal aliens, grants that support blasphemous art exhibits, welfare for able-bodied men too lazy to work, and all those $500 screwdrivers at the Pentagon. They've convinced themselves that stuff like that adds up to about half the budget.

Second, the ideas in Rauch's article are all cribbed (without attribution) from Ron Perlstein's Nixonland, which I reviewed a year ago. The real significance of Rauch's article is to launder Perlstein's liberal insights for use in conservative conversations.

A big piece of that laundering is to dismiss the racism that figures prominently in Perlstein's analysis. Getting racism out of the discussion is so important that Rauch does in it the second paragraph: “racism … is marginal in today's GOP.” This style of laundering was summarized by conservative strategist Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview with Bob Herbert:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.

Today's conservative says “English only” or “illegal immigrant” or “Obama's a Muslim” or “Where's his birth certificate?” or reserves the word terrorist for Muslims, preferably swarthy ones. But they don't say “spick” or “nigger” or “camel jockey” in public, and they don't stand up and yell “Segregation forever!” like Wallace did, so they're not racists or any other kind of bigot. (Among themselves, though, they still think racism is funny. Still.)

Seriously, if you're building your appeal on the fears and resentments of whites — and make no mistake about it, the Tea Party rallies are almost entirely white — you have to be blind not to see that a lot of those fears and resentments concern race.

Matt Yglesias critiques Rauch, saying that right-wing populism's place in the conservative movement is not some new trend.

When the prejudices of the sociocultural minority clash with the interests of economic elites, as they do on immigration, then we see splits inside the movement. But ordinarily business conservatism and right-wing populism work together extremely comfortably and always have.

Politico got its hands on a slide show prepared for Republican National Committee fund-raisers. On the Motivations to Give slide, #1 on the list is “fear”. Another slide asks: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the Senate, or the House … ? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!” Politico comments:

Manipulating donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly unique to Republicans or to the RNC – Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms – but rarely is it practiced in such cartoonish terms.

My reaction: It's a real shame that the RNC can't “sell … the White House” any more.

The best response I saw was from WaPo's Kevin Huffman. (Maybe that's why he won the “America's Next Great Pundit” contest.) He offers the RNC genuinely constructive advice that is so obvious as to become satire:

[I]n the context of donor targets that are visceral, reactionary and motivated by fear, it makes sense to portray your opponents as scary, cartoonish radicals. Nonetheless, my suggestion, based on some grainy footage I saw recently of Ronald Reagan, is to consider a more optimistic frame. This might be off the wall, but hear me out: What if the RNC developed a couple of serious policy initiatives and then messaged them as concrete reasons for people to support you? I'd be happy to look at any ideas, if that'd be helpful.

Rachel Maddow's response to the RNC slides was pretty funny too. The whole idea that portraying Harry Reid as Scooby Doo is scary … well, that's scary in a different way. Or, as Rachel put it in her teaser for this segment, “Roo?”

North Carolina Republican Rep. Sue Myrick faced her Muslim constituents last week and answered questions about why she wrote a positive foreword for a Muslim-bashing book, describing its author as “a great American”. Like the Republicans who aren't racists, Myrick isn't anti-Muslim. She's just against (as the book's subtitle puts it) “the secret underworld that's conspiring to Islamize America.” In the past she has raised suspicion about the Middle Easterners “who run all the convenience stores across the country.” But she can't be a racist because, as she notes, “I've got Arab friends.”

The Power of One Senator
In Terry Prachett's Discworld novels, he describes the semi-benevolent dictatorship of his capital city as a one-man one-vote system: “The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” 
Sometimes the Senate seems that way, like last week when Senator Jim Bunning single-handed delayed a bill to extend certain emergency economic measures. Tuesday, Bunning backed down and the bill passed by a wide margin (78-19) — but not before 100,000 Americans saw their unemployment benefits interrupted, 2000 workers had to stop working on transportation projects, and doctors temporarily faced a 21% drop in Medicare reimbursements. (The WSJ editorial page loved this bit of obstruction, calling it Jim Bunning's Finest Hour.)
If you're like me, you heard the what of the story, but you're still a little fuzzy on the how. How can one senator stop something that 78 other senators want to vote for? Ditto for the holds Senator Shelby put on about 70 Obama nominees who still had not been approved by the Senate. How did he do that? (Shelby also backed down on February 9, and 27 nominees got confirmed by unanimous consent on February 11. Other confirmations have trickled in since, usually by wide margins.)
Filibusters may not make a lot of sense from a democracy standpoint, but at least I understand the rules: The Senate can keep debating a bill until 60 senators support a resolution calling for an immediate vote. So any 41 senators can keep a bill in the Never-Never-Land of endless debate. But one senator? How does one senator get so much power?
The mainstream media has been almost totally remiss in covering how this works, but fortunately David Waldman explained it all on DailyKos nearly two years ago, when Senator Coburn had holds on 100 bills. The key is timing. Long-term, one senator can't prevent the Senate from doing what 60+ senators want, but the machinery for working around a hold takes about a week and is a big headache for the majority leader (who is supposed to keep the Senate's business running smoothly). So if a bill is coming down to the wire and requires immediate action (as the Bunning bill did), one senator can guarantee that the Senate will miss the deadline. 
Here's the main idea: The Senate's formal rules are unbelievably cumbersome, but most of the time they're not used. Instead, other than the major votes on contentious issues, most Senate business gets done by unanimous consent. Essentially, the majority leader suggests to the Senate: “If nobody objects, let's just skip all the rigamarole and cut to the chase.” Usually nobody does object, because (as I explained last week) the Senate traditionally has worked by gentlemen's agreement rather than according to its formal rules.
A hold happens when a senator informs the majority leader that s/he plans not to go along with unanimous consent on some piece of business. The senator could have a legitimate reason. For example, maybe the majority leader has made a mistake by treating this item as routine business, because some serious issue is lurking under the surface. Or maybe there is no hidden issue, everybody knows exactly what's going on, and the senator is just being a jerk — as Bunning, Shelby, and (to a lesser extent) Coburn all were. Then the majority leader has to decide whether it's worth his (and the Senate's) time to blast through the hold via the official procedures. Often it isn't.
None of this is in the Constitution, which says only: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” Early on, the Senate set up its rules to give each senator a lot of consideration, with a corresponding gentlemen's agreement that senators would use their individual power responsibly. That unwritten agreement was enforced by the small size and clubbishness of the Senate. (Originally there were only 26 senators. By contrast, a single committee in today's House of Representatives might be twice that size.) Every senator had a one-on-one relationship with every other senator, and they all understood that it was a bad idea to annoy the other club members for no good reason.
Senate rules have been amended at various times since, but the basic idea — individual power exercised under a gentlemen's agreement of good behavior — has stuck. Sadly, that's all breaking down now, and has been for decades. Eventually the rules are going to have to change, because more and more senators don't care about their relationships with other senators and enjoy the attention they can get by being jerks. (Bunning hasn't had this much publicity since he pitched a perfect game in 1964.) Changing the rules is hard, though, because it means that individual senators of both parties are going to have to yield some of their power to the Senate leadership. They are understandably reluctant to do that, especially since they know that this could all work if senators would just behave themselves.
Health Care and Public Opinion
As the Democrats move towards final passage of health-care reform, Republican objections are getting more shrill. I find it particularly odd how horrified they are that Democrats might ignore polls (especially this one by Fox News) showing that a majority of the public doesn't want the bill passed. This constitutes “ramming” the bill “down the throats” of the American public.
When they were in power, Republicans thought that ignoring polls was a virtue. In March of 2008, when ABC's interviewer pointed out to Dick Cheney that the American public overwhelming thought the Iraq War was not worth fighting, Cheney famously replied: “So?” During the 2000 campaign, Bush said:

I really don't care what the polls and focus groups say. What I care about is doing what I think is right.

In those days that was considered Leadership, and Republicans cheered it as courageous and principled. But when President Obama does it, it's “a defiant 'screw you' to the nation.”
I'm with Nate Silver on this. I think the public does oppose the bill, but they do so because they think it raises the deficit, is a government takeover of health care, funds abortion, and creates death panels that will pull the plug on your grandmother — all of which are false.
Here's the thing about getting people not to do stuff by lying about it: If you succeed, you're never caught in the lie. If I tell you that Sesame Street is a nasty, violent, horrible show, and as a result you never watch it — then you'll never find out that I lied to you. 
That's what happened to the Clinton health care program. Republicans and the insurance industry told amazing lies about it, and they paid no price for those lies because the public avoided the experience that would have proved them wrong. To this day, what the public remembers about Hillarycare are the false reasons why they didn't like it.
If health-care reform doesn't pass this time, the same thing will happen — and in November the voters will punish all the Democrats who voted for those horrible death panels. But if it does pass, then media coverage will swing from the he-said/she-said stories about funding abortion to stories about what the bill actually will do. People will find out how the bill affects them, and most of them will like it.
And that's why the Republicans are getting so shrill.

Senator Byrd, widely considered the Senate's foremost expert on its own history and procedures, explains why the plan to use reconciliation in health-care reform passes muster.

Check out Jon Stewart's take on the health-care debate and its coverage.

Changing the Tone
President Obama's pledge to “change the tone in Washington” is usually interpreted as a commitment to bipartisanship, and then judged to be a broken promise: Either Obama was naive to think he could work with Republicans, or he hasn't tried hard enough. 

That framing only works, though, if you forget what the tone was during the Bush administration, when critics of Bush policies routinely had their patriotism questioned. Obama really has changed that tone: He treats Republicans like loyal Americans, even when they won't compromise with him.

If you want to remember what the old Bush-Cheney days were like, check out this new ad by Liz Cheney, in which Justice Department lawyers who previously represented detainees in Guantanamo are referred to as “the Al Qaeda 7” — an attack that even many conservative blogs say is unfair.

I'm glad the TPM article on this brought up John Adams, who defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre and called it “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” That's the true American tradition. Liz and her father can have Joe McCarthy on their team; I'll take John Adams. 
Short Notes

Something struck me wrong about Tom Friedman's column Wednesday, but it took Matt Yglesias to nail it down for me:

it’s really remarkable that we live in a world where talking to the CEO of a large company [and then] reporting that the CEO wants tax breaks and subsidies for his firm counts as serious political commentary. Read today’s Tom Friedman piece and watch in amazement as he doesn’t even consider the possibility that [Intel CEO] Paul Otellini’s ideas might be motivated by anything other than a disinterested concern for the welfare of the American people.

Funny-or-Die assembles all the presidents since Ford (well, their Saturday Night Live equivalents, anyway) to buck up Obama's courage for taking on the banks and re-regulating finance.

Thursday was National Grammar Day, with a music video and everything. That got Kevin Drum talking about the related subject of punctuation, which we take very seriously here in New Hampshire. Punctuation is the only difference between “John Lynch, the governor” and “John! Lynch the governor!”

The last thing I edited out of last week's Sift (to keep the word-count down) was an article about how creationists and global-warming deniers are getting together in one big anti-science coalition. I was just 48 hours ahead of the New York Times, which covered the same subject Wednesday.

This fits very well into the Perlstein-Rauch analysis I was describing above, because both creationism and global-warming denial depend on populist resentment of the scientific “elite” and a corresponding conspiratorial view of how the scientific community works: Scientists look down their noses at ordinary people while they push their own God-denying world-socialism-promoting agenda.

Scientists have a hard time responding to this populist resentment, because they can't honestly claim to respect the people who advocate it. Concerning both evolution and global warming, the anti-science lobby wants to force public schools to “teach the controversy”. But from a scientific point of view, both issues are part of the eternal controversy between Knowledge and Ignorance. The whole point of having schools is to help Knowledge win that argument.

Stephen Colbert follows up on the revelation that the ACORN-pimp-advising video was edited by doing an edited interview with Sean Hannity.

Same-sex marriage became legal in two new capitals this week: Washington D.C. and Mexico City. Officials at the National Weather Service report that the sky has not fallen.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Sufficient Causes

February 22, 2010 – 12:10 pm
We humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow
In this week's Sift:
  • Meet Joe Stack. The media can't decide whether the Austin kamikaze was a terrorist or not, but they're sure he was crazy. I'm sure he was a terrorist, but his manifesto sounds disconcertingly sane to me.
  • Torture is Nobody's Fault. Nobody cares when Dick Cheney confesses to war crimes, and John Yoo gets off scot free. All in all, a bad week for the rule of law.
  • Short Notes. My town stands up to conservative slander. Coverage of the stimulus' first birthday lacks substance. A Lord's Prayer parody. The real Ronald Reagan opposed military tribunals. The rich get richer and pay lower taxes. Obama's outrages were OK when the white guy did them. And more.
Meet Joe Stack
I admit it. I came to the Austin-kamikaze story expecting to fit it into this larger narrative of right-wing violence: Sooner or later the more wigged-out conservatives start manifesting the figurative violence of mainstream conservative rhetoric.

I still believe that story, but I don't think Joe Stack is an example of it. I'm not even sure how wigged-out he was.

Crazy conspiracy-theory types have a writing style that gives them away. They're so overwhelmed by the power of their own thoughts that they can't imagine the reader's point of view. They strain for emphasis by WRITING IN ALL CAPS or inappropriate bold and italics or
 
OTHER 
BIZARRE 
FORMATTING.

They mix up the general and the particular, so that an abstract discussion of political philosophy suddenly turns into a denunciation of a boss, sibling, or ex-wife of no public consequence. They want to make sure history records not just that they were right about the direction of western culture, but also about that incident at the bar in El Paso.

If they're writing a suicide or martyrdom note, they often seem to be whipping themselves up to the deed, as if they were afraid of chickening out. And they aggrandize the deed itself: It is part of some messianic mission that will bring down the Powers of Evil.

Joe Stack's suicide note/manifesto does none of that. It is surprisingly readable. For example, his first line correctly anticipates the reader's state of mind:

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?”

Apparently Stack was a long-time anti-tax activist. He says that in the 80s he belonged to a group that tried to avoid taxes by using 

the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. … However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us. … That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0.

Throughout the piece, Stack's tone is alienated and embittered, but not irrational. He clearly believes that there is a corrupt power structure in this country, and that the people at the top (whether they are in government, business, unions, or churches) recognize each other's power and cooperate.

Is he wrong?

He contrasts the quick bailout of GM and the big banks with the slow effort to reform the medical system, where the insurance companies 

are murdering tens of thousands of people a year … It's clear [our political representatives] see no crisis as long as the dead people don't get in the way of corporate profits rolling in.

Bitter, yes. But do you have to be crazy to believe that?

About the plane-crash plan itself, he says very little — and nothing at all about his glorious martyrdom and the wonders it will accomplish. Instead, he seems quietly determined and claims only that other tactics will not work.

Nothing changes unless there is a body count … I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change.

Cynical, definitely. And immoral in his willingness to shed innocent blood to promote his agenda. And maybe, when the full story is told, we'll discover that he was crazy too. But nothing I've seen so far proves that.

The most ridiculous aspect of this story has been the media's uncertainty about calling it terrorism. The guy destroyed a civilian office building outside any war zone in order to produce “a body count” that would draw attention to his political agenda. That would seem to be a textbook example of terrorism — except that what terrorist really means these days is Muslim. That's why the Fort Hood shooter was called a terrorist, even though he targeted soldiers on a military base. (Strictly speaking, that should make him a traitor, but not a terrorist.) Glenn Greenwald elaborates. AtlanticWire collects a range of comments.

Just a couple days before the Stack crash, Fox was trying to make the University of Alabama shootings into an example of left-wing violence — despite a complete lack of evidence for any political motivation.

Senator Scott Brown gave his first post-election national TV interview to Neil Cavuto of (naturally) Fox News. (If you don't watch Fox you may not have noticed, but the network decided early on that the Haiti earthquake was boring and instead focused on promoting the Brown campaign.) 

TPM noticed Brown relating Joe Stack to his own voters, but I was more struck by what passes for an interview question on Fox. Cavuto asks: “Invariably people are going to look at this and say, well, that's where some of this populist rage gets you. Isn't that a bit extreme?”

So Cavuto imagines what “people” might say about Stack's attack, invents a response, and asks Brown to agree to that response. My question: Why does Brown need to be there at all when Cavuto can just interview his own imagination?
Torture is Nobody's Fault
It was a bad week for the rule of law. Last Sunday, Dick Cheney confessed to war crimes on national TV. Granted, he didn't say the exact words “I committed war crimes.” But he did say, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding.” Previously, he had told the Washington Times “I signed off on it.“

Only among American neo-cons is there any doubt that waterboarding is torture or that torture of captured enemies is a war crime or that authorizing a war crime is itself a war crime. But Cheney's confession was a non-issue. The NYT combined the Cheney confession with Joe Biden's appearance on a Sunday talk show under the headline: Dueling Vice Presidents Trade Barbs. The WaPo had similar coverage.

If Cheney travels outside the United States, he may be brought to justice through extraterritorial jurisdiction, a legal doctrine by which any country can claim jurisdiction over war crimes that cannot be prosecuted in the home country. Or a country whose citizens were waterboarded under Cheney's signature may prosecute him. Barring that, he will remain at large. (You can sign a petition calling for Cheney's prosecution.)

And then Friday, the Justice Department finally released the 289-page report of its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR is the Justice Department's internal watchdog agency) on the “torture memos” written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee for the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Council (OLC). The OLC is the official interpreter of the law for the executive branch, and other members of the executive branch use its opinions as cover — if the OLC says something is legal, how are they supposed to know it isn't?

That's why it's particularly bad if the OLC becomes corrupt and starts justifying whatever the president wants it to justify, as Yoo and Bybee did. If the penalty for such corruption is not harsh, you can wind up in what law professor Jonathan Turley has called “Mukasey's Paradox” (after Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey):

Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president — and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

In other words, there are crimes but no criminals — like torture, which violates the Convention Against Torture signed by Ronald Reagan, among other laws. But the torturers (and all those who had command responsibility over them, up to and including the president) can claim to have had the OLC's blessing. And yet the OLC is not responsible either. Everyone now admits the OLC's opinion was wrong, but so what?

That's essentially where we have wound up. The OPR report itself is highly critical of Yoo and Bybee. Each “committed professional misconduct” by failing to offer “independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice.” Yoo's misconduct is described as “intentional” and Bybee's as “reckless disregard of his duty”. (This is all on page 11 of the report.) OPR intended to refer these findings to state organizations that could have Yoo and Bybee disbarred as lawyers — which is already far too light a punishment, in my opinion.

However, the conclusions of the report (which were ready for release in 2008, but have been held up by various internal Justice Department processes) were set aside by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, who wrote a 69-page report supporting the statement: “I do not adopt OPR's findings of misconduct.”

So Yoo and Bybee walk away with no consequences whatsoever.

I have not read either report cover-to-cover. I may have more to say later.

Yesterday, General Petraeus came out against torture on Meet the Press:

I have always been on the record — in fact, since 2003 — with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we have (perhaps) taken expedient measures, they have turned around and bitten us in the backside.

On hearing this statement, Matt Yglesias pronounced the death of the Petraeus for President movement.

it seems impossible at this point to imagine a Republican nominee who believes in the rule of law and humane treatment of detainees. And that, in turn, is obviously a sad state of affairs.

Short Notes

I'm used to national conservatives making up sensational nonsense, but recently a local conservative has been slandering my town's public schools. During a hearing of the New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee, Nancy Elliott, a Republican state representative from neighboring Merrimack, said that a Nashua parent had told her that fifth-grade students in Nashua were being shown pictures of naked men and told how anal sex is performed. Elliott blamed New Hampshire's same-sex marriage law for this outrage, rather than the true culprit: her own lewd imagination.

Fortunately, a Nashua alderman had the courage to call her on it: “Either turn in the name of the mother whose child was subjected to this alleged display of pornography to the Nashua Police Department, as required by law to protect the children, or recant and apologize publicly.” Wednesday Alderman Sheehan got her apology from Elliott, who admitted that she could not verify her claims.

The first anniversary of the stimulus produced a lot of commentary, but not much insight. I found a lot of he-said/she-said about whether or not the stimulus was a success, but not much factual analysis of what it actually did. (I'd like to see an updated version of this pie chart.)

In general, critics of the stimulus point to the fact that unemployment is higher than it was a year ago, and they tell anecdotes about wasteful spending — most of which are uncheckable.

Supporters point to the conclusion of just-about-every-economist-in-the-world that unemployment would be much worse without the stimulus.

I've been unsuccessfully googling around to find an original source for this parody of the Lord's Prayer. I got a version by email and have found other versions online, so I've cobbled the parts I like best together with some amendments of my own:
 
Oh Wall Street, which owneth Congress,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy lobbyists come.
Thy will be done
in legislatures as it is in boardrooms.
Give the unemployed this day no daily bread,
and forbid the homeless from trespassing, lest they bother us.
Lead us not into compassion,
but deliver us from socialism.
For thine is the loophole and the earmark and the bailout
forever and ever.
Amen.
It's official: The very rich have been getting richer and paying lower tax rates. The government's report on the top 400 taxpayers showed that their inflation-adjusted incomes have increased 399%  from 1992 to 2007, while the bottom 90% of taxpayers saw an increase of only 13%. Meanwhile, the 400 paid an average tax rate of 16.6% in 2007 — less than rate they paid in 2006 and less than the rate paid by those making a thousand times less.

Back when I first analyzed the Palin phenomenon in September, 2008, I predicted she would have trouble with “the other Republican base” — not the working-class evangelicals, but the suburban professionals. At the time I fantasized what Barbara Bush might be thinking, but George Will would have worked just as well.

He still does. Thursday, George wrote the pretty much the same thing about Sarah that I wrote Monday.

Glenn Greenwald calls attention to the opposite media treatment of two similar events: It's bad for protesters to wave Mexican flags, but good for Sarah Palin to sport an Israeli-flag pin.

Ron Paul won the straw poll at the Conservative PAC convention Saturday with 31% of the vote. Romney got 22% and Palin 7%. Remind me again how popular Palin is.

Breaking news from the Onion News Network: The newly crowned Miss Teen USA declares herself beauty queen for life after executing several judges: “Opposition to my rule will be, like, totally crushed.” 

ONN also covers the protests against Minnesota's proposal to ban marriages between people who don't love each other. Says one protester: “Beth and I have been seething silently in front of the TV for years. You can't tell me that's not marriage.” 

At some point conservatives are going to have to decide how far to ride the energy of the lunatic fringe. Michael Gerson is already starting to worry.

These days racism always claims to be about something other than race, but whatever was OK when the white guy did it is outrageous when the black guy does it. Case in point: President puts feet on historic desk.

Oh, and now that we have a black president, we need an organization of military officers pledged not to follow unconstitutional orders (founded March, 2009). This apparently was not necessary under Bush and Cheney.

I know they can make up anti-Obama stories faster than anyone can check them, but you have to try sometimes: Obama actually did not use a teleprompter to talk to elementary school kids.

The comedians at Second City Network suggest a different way to make the point I wrote about last week: Climate is not weather.

Two interesting articles about the practice of journalism: (1) Michael Kinsley (Atlantic) claims that the conventions of newspaper-writing make stories much longer and harder to follow than necessary. And (2) George Packer (New Yorker) says that if the subject were war or finance, we would never accept the vapid stuff that passes for analysis of American politics:

A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt.

Harper's Scott Horton interviews Will Bunch about his book: Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy. The most interesting paragraph:

And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

Bremer was Reagan's Coordinator for Combating Terrorism at the time.

The New York Times Magazine had a long-but-worth-it article asking How Christian Were the Founders? It starts with the largely successful efforts of Christian fundamentalists to make Texas history texts say what they want: “that the United States was founded by devout Christians and according to biblical precepts.” And then it examines how accurate that position is.

Answer: It's complicated. Christianity and the Bible were indeed important to the Founders, but it's a mistake to jump to the conclusion that 18th-century Christianity was all one thing — namely, fundamentalism. The Founders interpreted the Bible in various ways, just as we do today. And ultimately you have to explain this: They could have referenced God or the Bible in the Constitution, but they chose not to. That couldn't have been an oversight.

I wish the article had made this point: In addition to Christianity, there was also a strong classical Roman influence on the Founders. They often wrote under Roman pseudonyms. (The Federalist, for example, was a originally series of newspaper articles signed “Publius” rather than Hamilton, Madison, and Jay.) And their ethical ideas had as much to do with Greco-Roman Stoicism as with Christianity.

Apropos of nothing: a hilarious story of what happens when your 2-year-old gets his hands on something totally embarrassing.

Former Senator Rick Santorum understands why Admiral Mullen and other military leaders want to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military: “I'm not too sure that we haven't so indoctrinated the officer corps in this country that they can actually see straight to make the right decision.”

That's because anyone who disagrees with Santorum can't have an actual reason, and because it's inconceivable that the head of the Joint Chiefs might know more about the military than Rick does.

According to the Wall Street Journal, female MBAs aren't keeping up with male MBAs. Prioritizing family over career may account for some of the long-term problems, but the bad first jobs are hard to explain without invoking discrimination.

Sunday the WaPo's Dana Milbank published what amounts to a fan letter for Rahm Emanuel, blaming every problem of Obama's first year on not listening to Emanuel. In response, Cynk Uygur does some interesting speculating: He figures that Emanuel is on his way out, and Milbank is publishing Rahm's parting shots for him.

Time will tell on that. But I have to comment on this Milbank assertion:

Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn't: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

After 10 years it's fair to ask: What “big things” started as bite-sized Clinton proposals? Seeing none, I draw the exact opposite lesson: Bite-sized proposals fritter away your supporters' energy. Being too small to affect most voters, they just validate the conservative view that government can't solve our problems. I give Clinton credit for being a good executive (at least by comparison to W). But he left the Democratic Party no Clintonism to run on — no long-term vision, no inspiring ideas, nothing to organize a movement around. That's why the Democrats got pounded in 2000, 2002, and 2004.

More details of the smear against ACORN are coming out.

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Dare to be Stupid

February 15, 2010 – 1:14 pm
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? 
— Will Rogers
In this week's Sift:
  • Dare to be Stupid. What's the responsible thing to do with a story that should never have gotten the public's attention to begin with? Ignore it and it festers. Debunk it you run the risk of entering the debate and becoming part of the problem. This week I follow Weird Al Yankovic's advice and dare to be stupid by covering two stupid stories: How the D.C. blizzard disproves global warming, and why Sarah Palin is a serious presidential candidate. 
  • The Future of Books. As we wait for the iPad to come out and possibly revolutionize the e-book market, a lot of people are talking about the future of books-on-paper.
  • The New Slums. Timothy Egan finds the forerunners of future slums in the over-built ex-urbs of San Francisco. It seems unthinkable that suburbs could become slums. But a lot of inner-city slums were unthinkable once too.
  • Short Notes. My favorite Marine survives to a distinguished retirement. Conservative American Christians suddenly notice the need for universal human rights. Greece has precisely the wrong amount of economic sovereignty. Health insurance rates are headed up already. And more.
Dare to Be Stupid

One of the challenges of journalism is figuring out what to say about a story that, in a perfect world, nobody would pay attention to at all — or maybe they'd pay just a little attention before going on to more important things. (“Where's Obama's birth certificate? Oh, wait, here it is. Never mind.”) You know the ones I mean — stupid stories, ones that give you a bad feeling about the general public and whether you want to be included in their number.

The problem with not covering a stupid story is that it runs along stupidly without you, like a dog dragging its leash down the trail. Every day a few more people hear the story, and if no one debunks it, then the folks who aren't stupid but just don't have a lot of time to check things out — they start to think it's true and maybe even important. (“Oh yeah. I heard that someplace.”) 

If you do cover it, though, you're drawing even more people's attention to it. You're adding to the noise, convincing people that there is an actual “controversy”,  and getting distracted from the stuff that actually deserves thinking and talking about. For example, every prime-time minute spent debunking “death panels” was a minute taken away from people who can't get medical care or who get it and then go bankrupt paying for it. 

Anyway, this week seemed to have more than its share of stupid stories. Let's roll up the cuffs of our pants and step out into the middle of two.

Snow Disproves Global Warming. This was a big theme on Fox News, where they put a copy of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth outside their D.C. offices and watched it disappear as the snow accumulated. “I'm not sure in which chapter,” host Eric Bolling announced sarcastically, “Mr. Gore dealt with record snowfalls across the whole Eastern seaboard.” The conservative movement's flagship newspaper, Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, led an editorial with this paragraph:

Record snowfall illustrates the obvious: The global warming fraud is without equal in modern science.

And the Virginia Republican Party thought the point was so persuasive that it based an attack ad on it.

Several sources — Bill McKibben, Time magazine, and so on — tried to respond intelligently, but to me they all sound like a guy giving his wife a perfectly rational explanation of why he's on the phone with his ex-girlfriend. The articles require readers to think, and meanwhile the visceral contradiction between warm and snow is being reinforced. 

For what it's worth, the intelligent discussion of the storm goes like this: Climatologists actually did predict that global warming would lead to more serious snowstorms. For example, last year's report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program says: 

Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

The atmosphere holds more moisture as it gets warmer, so precipitation of all sorts is likely to increase. If you live someplace that still gets below freezing occasionally, your odds of a major snowstorm go up rather than down. So warm and snow are paradoxical, not contradictory. (“Honey? What's wrong? Don't throw that.”)

By the way, this is also why Antarctic ice is still increasing. Global warming has two predicted effects on the polar icecaps: increased snowfall and increased melting. In the Arctic, melting is the stronger effect, but the Antarctic is still in the temporary period where increased snowfall is the stronger effect. A UN Environment Program report says:

Even if Antarctica were to warm in the future, its mass balance is expected to become more positive: The rise in temperature would be insufficient to initiate melt but would increase snowfall.

An even more intelligent point of view refuses to get into the snow-and-global-warming discussion at all, because weather and climate occur on such different time scales that it's foolish to mention them in the same sentence. (It's like claiming that I'm on a diet because I'm not eating at this particular moment.) No matter how much the planet warms over the course of our lifetimes, there will still be some cold days. Undoubtedly next summer there will be a heat wave somewhere, and I doubt that Fox News or the Washington Times will present it as evidence that Gore was right after all.

Rachel Maddow tried harder to explain the nonsense in laymen's terms, and even enlisted the help of Bill Nye the Science Guy. But I think the best answer is to laugh at it, as Stephen Colbert did. After showing some of the Fox coverage, Colbert described it as “simple observational research: whatever just happened is the only thing that is happening.” He went on to observe that it was dark outside, and concluded that the Sun had been destroyed.

The world has been plunged into total darkness. Soon all our crops will die, and it's only a matter of time before the mole people emerge from the center of the Earth to enslave us.

Sarah Palin is a Serious Presidential Candidate. Palin has been a non-stop stupid story ever since the 2008 campaign ended. She was newsworthy when she was the vice presidential candidate of a major political party (a party that became significantly less major because of her ticket's landslide loss). She was newsworthy in Alaska until she resigned after half a term as governor. Since then, not so much. She has no decision-making power, and her comments have not added a single quantum of insight to any issue. 

Nevertheless, I could have led with a Palin story almost every week since the election, and even I haven't been able to resist including an occasional short note about her, or her daughter (who is still on her pro-abstinence do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do tour of the country), or her daughter's baby papa, or her first-dude husband. The Palins absolutely should be on TV as a reality show. But news? No, I don't think so.

Palin's latest attempt to be newsworthy was to give the closing address at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville, which was a stupid story in itself. Picture a similar party on the Left, without Fox News to promote it 24/7. Wait, we don't have to picture it — there's a Green Party. Any idea when their next convention is? And while we're at it: What's the name of the current governor of Alaska? You know, the guy who picked up the responsibilities that Sarah couldn't be bothered with. 

I've watched the speech; it's standard Republican boilerplate — unspecific pleas to spend less and repeated invocations of “common sense solutions” that are never spelled out. And it's delivered badly. The audience, which paid big money specifically to see Palin, kept trying to get excited, but she mostly stepped on their enthusiasm. To get a view from the other side of the spectrum, check out Adam Kleinheider's claim that Palin is trying to “hijack” the Tea Party movement and that her speech was “derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism”.

Anyway, this performance convinced the Washington Post's David Broder (supposedly the dean of political columnists) that we should “Take Sarah Palin seriously” and that Palin is “at the top of her game”. Of course, the same David Broder declared in early 2007 that “President Bush is poised for a political comeback.” A football coach would be fired for a call that bad, but there are no standards for pundits, particularly at the Post. Meanwhile, a poll in the same newspaper said Palin's unfavorability rating had hit 55% compared to 37% favorable, a new low. “Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.”

In other words, only the pundit class really wants her to run. (And Democrats.)

Palin has a base: disaffected middle-aged and elderly white working-class evangelicals. That's nowhere near a majority, even in a Republican primary, and so far there's been not the slightest indication that she can attract anyone else. Jesse Jackson in 1988 had more upside than Palin does now. In 2008, the more the electorate saw of her, the less they liked her. That's going to hold true in 2012 as well.

No matter how much coverage she gets, she's still not newsworthy.

Steven Colbert demolishes Palin's rationalization of why Rush Limbaugh can use the phrase “f**king retard” but Rahm Emanuel can't.

Palin pledged to plow her $100K speaking fee back into the movement, but hasn't said how. Maybe she'll donate it to her PAC, so that it can buy more copies of her book.

Whenever Palin gets off her prepared script, she's in trouble. In response to a softball question at the Tea Party convention, she said: “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.” Is that what her policies depend on? Vote Palin and pray for a miracle?

2008's least newsworthy person, Joe the Plumber, now says John McCain “used” him and “screwed up my life.”

The Future of Books
Maybe it was the announcement of the Apple iPad, which will start shipping in late March, but something has caused another flurry of discussion about the future of books.

The New York Times noticed the decision of Cushing Academy to “give away most of its 20,000 books and transform its library into a digital center” and asked several experts to comment on this question: Do School Libraries Need Books? No one answers with a simple “no”, but the depth of the writers' support for printed books varies, along with their reasoning for that support.

To me, the most interesting point was made by several people. Nicholas Carr put it like this:

The pages of a book shield us from the distractions that bombard us during most of our waking hours. As an informational medium, the book focuses our attention, encouraging the kind of immersion in a story or an argument that promotes deep comprehension and deep learning.

I get that point if we're talking about web browsing on a computer, where a chat window might pop up at any moment and dozens of links are always available. But I've had a Kindle for almost a year, and what it does best is re-create the focused space of a book. 

Liz Gray talks about how inexpensive books are, but that's only true in certain ways. Books are cheap, but libraries are expensive. You could buy a Nook or an iPad loaded with the Great Books collection (nearly all of which are in the public domain and essentially free as e-books) far cheaper than you could buy the paper-and-ink collection from Britannica. Which is more economical depends on a lot of assumptions about how the texts will be used.

I was glad to see all the participants dismiss the idea that paper/e-book is an either/or choice, as if buying an e-book reader would be a complete mistake if it didn't replace all the paper in your life.

In a separate discussion, Henry Farrell and Matt Yglesias make the link between e-books and the problem that so many nonfiction books are padded. Yglesias:

One reason I haven’t wound up using my Kindle as much as I thought I would is that it’s dramatically easier to flip/scan/skim with a paper book and an awful lot of books that are by no means bad books demand a lot of flipping/scanning/skimming. … [I]n my experience it’s reasonably rare for even a pretty good non-fiction book to be an absolute masterpiece of composition that demands to be read from beginning to end. And unfortunately the trend is toward less-and-less in the way of the kind of editing that produces really well-crafted books.

But since an e-book's length is just a number (and doesn't have the symbolic value of a paper-book's physical heft) Farrell hopes we'll see a new market for the short e-book:

Ideally, we will end up in a world where people won’t feel obliged to pad out what are really essays to book length in order to get published and compensated.

I might as well make my prediction about the effect of the iPad. Dedicated readers will still want to have a dedicated e-book device like an improved Kindle or Nook, precisely for the closing-off-the-world effect Nicholas Carr attributes to paper-books. But lots more people will get iPads as generalized entertainment machines, and they will each read a few books on them.

The New Slums

Timothy Egan has an important article on his NYT blog: Slumburbia. He describes some California planned communities that were built during the housing bubble. They're two hours from San Francisco and now it's hard to find people who want to live there. 

Now median home prices have fallen from $500,000 to $150,000 — among the most precipitous drops in the nation — and still the houses sit empty, spooky and see-through, waiting on demography and psychology to catch up. In strip malls where tenants seem to last no longer than the life cycle of a gold fish, the bottom-feeders have moved in. “Coming soon: Cigarette City,” reads one sign here in Lathrop, near a “Cash Advance” outlet. Take a pulse: How can a community possibly be healthy when one in eight houses are in some stage of foreclosure? How can a town attract new people when the crime rate has spiked well above the national average? How can a family dream, or even save, when unemployment hovers around 16 percent?

For half a century, it has been unimaginable that the suburbs could turn into slums. But many of the inner-city slums that we take for granted today (or are re-gentrifying) were once fashionable neighborhoods too.

Egan calls attention to another unexpected fact: The recovering west-coast markets are the ones with strict housing codes: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego.

The developers’ favorite role models, the laissez faire free-for-alls — Las Vegas, the Phoenix metro area, South Florida, this valley — are the most troubled, the suburban slums. Come see: this is what happens when money and market, alone, guide the way we live.

Short Notes
If you've been wondering what ever happened to that Marine I wrote about in Supporting My Troop in 2006, I went to his retirement ceremony Friday. Steve goes out as a Chief Warrant Officer 4. (Warrant officer is a rank most people haven't heard of, because there aren't that many of them. It sits between officers and enlisted men. CWO-5 is the highest rank you can get by coming up through the enlisted ranks.) A general officiated and awarded him the Legion of Merit — it and the Medal of Honor are the only American medals that are worn around the neck rather than pinned to a uniform.

He's been back to Iraq and Afghanistan several times since I wrote about him, and from his emails I have picked up such un-actionable intelligence as the fact that Bagram gets cold in January. 

Some retirements are sad, but this one wasn't. Steve seems both proud of his career and happy that it's over. (He would have retired sooner if he hadn't been stop-lossed.) I share some vicarious pride, and I'm happy that no one will be shooting at him now. After he gets used to civilian life, I'm planning to point out how well decorated military veterans have done as Democratic candidates for Congress.

Glenn Greenwald and Digby both comment on this: The same people who think that foreign-born Muslims accused of terrorism should have no rights at all are outraged that white American Christians accused of kidnapping Haitian children may not be treated with full respect.

Whether this is due to hypocrisy (as Glenn says) or lack of empathy (Digby), you either believe in human rights or you don't. You can't expect anybody to take you seriously if you claim that other people have to respect the rights of people like you, but that people-not-like-you can be treated like animals. Digby:

It turns out that having a rule of law commonly respected the world over really comes in handy at a time like this. And every time the US government chisels away at our system of justice in the name of “protecting ourselves”, or some yahoo prattles on about how someone doesn't deserve the same rights as somebody else, that fundamental protection gets weaker and weaker.

Fasteddie9318 on DailyKos compiles statements from a number of such yahoos: Scott Brown, Judd Gregg, Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Charles Krauthammer. All of them talk about the administration's “decision” to “grant” or “give” rights to people accused of terrorism. Here's the point (with my added emphasis):

It seems that conservatives see the Bill of Rights as a list of generous gifts from our government to its citizenry, rather than what it is: a list of prohibitions on government action to restrict or deny rights that it recognizes as universal. By that [conservative misconception], there are no inherent human rights, and if rights can be given by a government at will, then they can also be taken away just as easily.

Newt Gingrich can't get his story straight about when we should treat terrorists as criminals.

Europe is discovering the downside of a currency zone that is bigger than any government: Greece can't devalue its currency (the Euro) and it can't count on help from the rest of the EU.

I'm waiting for the moral and fiscal watchdogs on the Right to condemn Blackwater billing the government for a prostitute.

Robert Reich's health insurance company just raised individual premiums 39%.

A new poll says Americans want gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. It's not even close: 57% – 38%. And 82% think the military shouldn't discipline gays who get outed against their will.

Last week's “Why are liberals so condescending?” op-ed in the WaPo was solicited by the editors, not volunteered by the author. That's your liberal media in action.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Think and Imagine

February 8, 2010 – 10:05 am
Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we have to think. — Winston Churchill
In this week’s Sift:
  • Thinking Deficit. I can understand the $1.6 trillion deficit in this year’s budget. It’s the $1 trillion in 2020 that bugs me. One way or another, that’s not going to happen. But which way?
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look at Methland by Nick Reding. If a book about a drug problem makes you think of bad high school assemblies and Reefer Madness, think again. Reding connects the dots between crystal meth, the forces that are destroying our small towns, and the corporate-dominated political system that keeps us from doing anything about it.
  • Deniers Deny that Climategate is Debunked. A Penn State investigation reveals what I told you at the time: The Climategate emails don’t show anything underhanded. But Senator Inhofe misstates the investigation’s conclusion, the same way he misstates everything about global warming.
  • Short Notes. Just two this week: Barack and I miss each other again, and John Oliver extends don’t-ask-don’t-tell to John McCain’s age.
Thinking Deficit
There are two ways to look at a new federal budget: You can narrow in on how your favorite programs fared, or you can step back and wonder where it’s all going. I’ll skip the narrow look, because lots of people are doing it and I can’t guess what your favorite programs are anyway.
Coverage of the big picture has mostly centered on getting hysterical about the size of next year’s deficit: $1.6 trillion, up from the current $1.4 trillion. Color me unfazed. Like Paul Krugman, I’m more worried about cutting spending while unemployment is this high than I am about the sheer size of one year’s deficit.
What does worry me, though, is the projected deficits of the next ten years: They go down as the economy recovers, but they bottom out at over $700 billion in 2014. Then they start up again and hit $1 trillion again in 2020. And even that sorry scenario is based on the assumption that the next ten years are normal economic times. What if we have to adjust to something major, like a fall in world oil production, a deadly global epidemic, yet another war, or a chain-reaction of global warming effects?
Everyone wants to pose as tough-on-the-deficit these days, but on all sides it’s more flash than substance. As Matt Yglesias points out, not even Democrats propose major tax increases, not even Republicans propose big cuts in Social Security and Medicare (with one exception we’ll discuss below), and neither calls for scaling back the global mission of our military. But that’s the whole ball game — taxes, entitlements, the military — everything else just nibbles at the edges.
All this can continue as long as foreign central banks are willing to loan us money — not forever, in other words. If they decide we’ve had enough, a deadly chain reaction starts: The interest rate we have to pay goes up, raising the deficit even further. It’s a musical-chairs moment when everyone who has been dancing merrily suddenly scrambles to grab a seat.
I think a lot of us are beginning to realize something politicians still can’t say in public: We have entered an era of broken promises, and we won’t come out of it for a long time. The only question is: Which promises will get broken and how suddenly? Will it happen like the 2008 collapse, where overnight the the rock-solid stock in your IRA — the AIG or General Motors or Fannie Mae — became worthless? Will our pensions and cash savings suddenly inflate away, as happened to so many Russians after the Soviet Union fell? Will we all deny that it’s happening, while simultaneously trying to make sure that the brunt of any shortfall hits somebody else? Or will we rise to the occasion, set some priorities, and scale back our expectations sensibly together?
So far it’s hard to give good odds on that last outcome. We all need to train ourselves to object to the words unthinkable and unimaginable. (As in “It’s unthinkable that America would step back from its global responsibilities.”) Thinking and imagining are tools for choosing the future rather than having it forced on you. We should use them.

The outer limit of what a Republican can propose is Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” which eliminates the long-term deficit.

If you cut to the chase, he does it by getting rid of Medicare: The government sets strict limits on how much it will spend on privatized vouchers for seniors to buy their own insurance. Eventually medical inflation trivializes the value of the vouchers, and the government is off the hook. Matt Yglesias elaborates:

Right now if you’re old, and you get sick, and there’s some treatment that will uncontroversially cure you, then doctors come and cure your illness no matter your income. The Ryanverse won’t look like that. … Lots of seniors will die preventable deaths due to lack of funds.

The rest of Ryan’s proposal is (as Kevin Drum says) smoke and mirrors. He sets limits on the growth of various kinds of spending, which is fine until you have to specify exactly what you’re not going to fund — which Ryan doesn’t do.
Other Republicans like to point out that there is a Republican plan to solve the deficit problem, but they won’t stand behind even its sketchy details. Still, I’d like to see a corresponding liberal thought experiment, no matter how politically unthinkable its specifics would be.
The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …
Most drug-epidemic books are like the assemblies we suffered through in high school, full of Reefer-Madness urban legends about evil pushers and weak-willed addicts who suffer horrible fates.
Instead, Nick Reding has written one of those rare dot-connecting books. To Reding, the meth epidemic is all about what’s wrong with our small towns — he focuses on Oelwin, Iowa — and with the national political system that keeps us from fixing our problems. It’s not just about smugglers and dealers and users. It’s about Big Pharma, agribusiness, illegal immigration, and squeezing the working class out of the American dream.
Mayberry’s Drug Problem. A year or two ago, when a cousin died prematurely of no apparent cause, my father speculated that he had showed signs of meth addiction. At the time I didn’t think to ask: When did my Dad learn the signs of meth addiction? How could there be a drug problem that this 80-something farmer knew more about than I did?
Meth is different from our other drug epidemics, in ways that are hard to discuss honestly in public. Mainstream America has always pictured drug problems as centered in segments of the population that are … expendable. Sure, there might be drugs in the local high school, but that’s just spill-over from the black ghetto or the hippies or new immigrants we didn’t want here anyway. The problem always really belonged to those people — how dare they bring their filth into our communities?
We can’t tell that story about meth. The center of the meth epidemic is small-town white America, the kind of people who show up at Sarah Palin rallies and think of themselves as the “real” Americans. A modern-day Sheriff Andy would be tracking down Mayberry’s meth labs rather than watching Otis sleep it off in jail.
Millions Americans are like me: We don’t live in a Mayberry, but we think of ourselves as from there. Somewhere in the back of our minds is a grandmother’s house that is over the river and through the woods. It’s beyond our imagination that the people who live in that house now might be meth addicts.
Because it was so incongruous, so injurious to our national mythology, the meth problem flew under the radar for a long time. At first Reding thought it was his strange luck to keep running into meth stories while he was researching something else. After he became convinced that meth was a widespread problem, he couldn’t get big-city editors interested. A Mayberry-centered drug problem didn’t make sense, so it couldn’t be happening.
What meth does. You can’t understand the epidemic without appreciating the biology. The human body has a reward system. When you do something you know is good, chemicals get released in your brain. That’s what feelings like pride, satisfaction, and general well-being come down to: neuro-chemicals.
Meth tricks that system. Take meth, and suddenly you have the brain chemistry of someone who just scored the winning touchdown or aced the SATs. You feel like you can do anything, but you don’t have to, because everything is fine. You don’t even need to eat or drink or sleep.
Short-term, meth is performance-enhancing: You can ignore obstacles and do more stuff better. Long-term, meth screws up the system it tricks. If you quit using the drug, suddenly you can’t generate feelings of pride, satisfaction, or general well-being no matter what you do. Even if you score the winning touchdown in reality — it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t feel like anything without meth.
Working class values. Our culture idealizes hard work. Pulling an all-nighter, going pedal-to-the-metal to get the big project done — those are heroic stories, the kind we like to tell about ourselves. A drug that helps you do those things seems almost virtuous.

It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth, like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in one-to-one ratio with the defining ideal of American culture.

Reding follows a number of Oelwin residents throughout the book. One is Roland Jarvis. He started taking meth in the 1980s so that he could work occasional back-to-back shifts at Iowa Ham, the local meat-packing plant. The factory was paying $18 an hour and meth was cheap by comparison. Then Iowa Ham got bought by Gillette and then by Tyson and then eventually closed. Wages got slashed to $6.50 an hour with no benefits, and then the jobs went away altogether.
How do working-class people deal with a drop in income? They work harder. They take second and third jobs. They sleep less. If a drug will help you do that — what a godsend! And if your place in the legitimate economy goes away, there’s an illegitimate economy that needs hard-working people too. You can start cooking meth yourself and selling it to your friends so that they can work three jobs.
Once you start cooking your own meth, you can be high all the time — including when you’re cooking meth. One cold winter night, Jarvis had a paranoid delusion that the cops were about to raid him. So he dumped all his chemicals down the same drain, and they blew up. Impervious to pain, Jarvis thought he could fight the fire, but he wound up burning off his hands and his nose. When the EMTs eventually found him running around frantically, near-naked in the snow, they hoped that he would just fall over and die, because they didn’t know what to do with him. But he lived.
Immigration. You know who really wants a hard, dangerous $6.50-an-hour job with no benefits? An illegal immigrant. The meat-packing plants of Middle America have lots of them. Illegals acquire somebody else’s driver’s license and social security number. The employer doesn’t look at it too hard, and everybody’s happy.
The illegal immigration problem is hard to solve because many powerful people don’t want to solve it. Employers all over the country depend on illegal immigrants not just to take bad jobs, but to keep legal workers in their place. Don’t want to take a 2/3rds pay cut? Good luck in your next job. Want to protect yourself by organizing a union? Labor laws don’t apply to illegals. You can’t organize workers that the management could have arrested and deported whenever it wants.
Everybody knows how to stop illegal immigration. You enforce the law on the people who have something to lose: the employers. Every day, some bar gets shut down because it accepts fake IDs too easily. You could shut down factories the same way. When the jobs dry up, the immigrants will stop coming.
But if you want to put on a show of fighting illegal immigration without actually doing anything about it, you build a fence at the border. Think about it: If there is opportunity on one side of a border and none on the other, people will cross. Not even the Berlin Wall kept everybody in. How is our fence going to keep people out? Arrest them, send them back — even shoot them down like the Soviets did — and more will come.

[T]alk of increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with — and as a cynical addendum to — an utter lack of interest in removing the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.

Where meth comes from. Two places: Home cookers, who we’ll discuss in a minute, and Mexico. The vast majority of illegal Mexican immigrants have no connection to the drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs in narc jargon). But once there’s an outside-the-law highway to bring illegals to factories in Iowa, drug traffickers can use it to bring meth right to the working-class communities. Being poor, desperate, and easily replaced, the illegals don’t take a big cut. And when drug-smuggling illegals try to avoid the notice of police and other authorities, they look just like all the other illegals.

the same American immigration policy that provides a low-wage workforce ideal for the food industry is what keeps the DTOs in business. … the interests of the DTOs are aligned with the likes of Cargill and ADM.

Home cooking. To make your own meth you need some farm-related chemicals, plus either ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine. Back in the 80s, the DEA wanted pharmaceutical companies to rigorously account for all the ephedrine they imported and what they did with it. The Mercks and Pfizers didn’t want to, and they pay lobbyists to keep Congress from making them do things they don’t want to do. It took a long time for the DEA to get effective regulation.
Then the cookers switched to pseudo-ephedrine, which you can find in over-the-counter decongestants. There are ways to make equally effective decongestants with similar molecules that can’t be turned into meth, but again, the drug companies didn’t want to. They allowed Congress to regulate pure powdered pseudo-ephedrine, but not pills. So cookers bought enough decongestants to dry up Niagra, ground them into powder, and didn’t miss a beat.
Eventually, meth started making headlines. When it appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 2005, Congress had to do something, so it passed the Combat Meth Act, which appeared to give the DEA everything it wanted: Limits on how much pseudo-ephedrine a customer could buy, plus a record-keeping network that you couldn’t circumvent by going from one store to the next.
But the final draft was influenced by another group of lobbyists: the National Association of Retail Chain Stores (NARCS, believe it or not). The Walgreens and CVSs didn’t want to keep those records, or tell customers they couldn’t buy something they wanted. So they pressured Congress to let the states enforce the law, and then they pressured the states not to enforce it. Reding quotes Tony Loya of the DEA:

“We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible for complying. It’s stunning.”

Agribusiness vs. agrarian culture. Every drug problem eventually comes down to the users. Why do they do it? Each user’s story is unique, but there are also larger forces at work: The fewer opportunities people have to experience satisfaction in their real lives, the more tempting drug-induced satisfaction is.
The biggest difference between the Mayberry of Sheriff Andy and the Oelwin of Roland Jarvis is that the food business has been taken over by giant corporations. Farming towns and mining towns once represented the two extremes of small-town life. In farming towns, multiple independent producers and small businesses traded with each other. The economies were robust, the power structures democratic. By contrast, mining towns were company towns. Wages were whatever the company paid, prices whatever the company store charged.

Today, farming and mining communities are becoming indistinguishable says [sociologist William] Heffernan.

More and more land is either owned or contracted by Cargill or some other giant. Increasingly, farmers grow what the company tells them to grow and sell for what the company is willing to pay. Increasingly, local businesses are chain stores, managed by people who weren’t born nearby and hope to be promoted to somewhere far away. Relationships that used to be permanent are now temporary. Money that used to rattle around in the local economy now zooms off to corporate headquarters.
The small town of myth, the one that exemplified true American values, wasn’t just small. It had a particular kind of culture — a culture of people, not corporations. That culture is a thing of the past.

In my telling meth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it. The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come.

Deniers Deny that Climategate is Debunked
At the center of the trumped-up Climategate scandal was Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. A Penn State commitee of two deans and the university’s research integrity officer just released their completed report, which concludes

that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data …[or in] any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data … [or in] any misuse of privileged or confidential information available to him in his capacity as an academic scholar.

After clearing Mann of these three accusations, the investigating committee noted that the fourth accusation (whether Mann “deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research”) would be better judged by a committee of researchers, so they appointed one. Nothing in the report indicates that the fourth accusation will prove to be any more credible than the first three.
Unsurprisingly, James Inhofe (the Republican senator from Exxon-Mobil Oklahoma) is completely ignoring the Mann-vindicating parts of the report, writing only: “Penn State’s internal inquiry found further investigation is warranted.”
Short Notes
Tuesday President Obama was in Nashua and I was close to his home in Hyde Park. Our paths didn’t cross.

John McCain had an open mind about repealing don’t-ask-don’t-tell — until it became an actual possibility. Now he’s against it. The Daily Show responded with a discussion about whether people as old as McCain should be allowed to serve in the Senate.

Jon Stewart: It’s not like John McCain chose to be old.
John Oliver: What, Jon? You think he was born old?

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Safe Ground

February 1, 2010 – 9:19 am
Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
— Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible

In this week’s Sift:
  • What Happened in Massachusetts? Scott Brown won for a lot of reasons, and some of them will be a problem for all Democrats in November. But moving to the right isn’t the answer.
  • Obama Bounces. Progressives needed to hear a good State of the Union speech from Obama, and they did. Then he ran rings around House Republicans in a televised Q&A session.
  • Short Notes. The economy grows, but jobs don’t. Justice O’Connor disagrees with the Court. CBS favors conservative ads. How Norway beats staph. A jury refuses to justify killing an abortionist. Good-bye to Howard Zinn. And more.
What Happened in Massachusetts?
Few political events could have been more surprising than the Democrats losing Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate on January 19. Massachusetts was the only state that McGovern carried against Nixon in 1972. President Obama got 62% of the vote there just 14 months ago. But Martha Coakley lost to Scot Brown on January 18, and it wasn’t even close: 52-47.
So what happened?
Surprising events seldom have just one cause: Large national forces were at work, Brown ran a better campaign than Coakley, and some of it was luck. If you want to give a no-big-deal explanation, you focus on luck and tactics. If you want to tell a this-changes-everything story, you focus on the national forces. Let’s go through all three.
Luck. This election came at a bad time for the Democrats. The economy is sufficiently out of the woods that it’s hard to remember how scared we all were a year ago. (Any time you dodge a bullet, denial quickly kicks in and you start telling yourself, “That gun was never really loaded.”) But the recovery is not far enough along to have produced any jobs yet. Plus, Republicans have succeeded in pretending that the Bush administration never happened, or if it did happen, it was a very long time ago and has nothing to do with our current problems. (Rachel Maddow’s account is hilarious: “It’s almost like the Republicans want us to believe they didn’t exist until about two weeks ago.”)
The Massachusetts election was also just a week or two before the expected final vote on the health-care bill, just as the final wording was being worked out by the House/Senate conference committee. Consequently, all the media coverage was about the ugly process and not the result. The whole country has watched the bill get more complicated and insurance-company-friendly — not because the changes were popular or made sense, but because the last two or three senators managed to hold the bill hostage.
Worse, even the content-based coverage focused on the little contentious details that still needed to be worked out: abortion, enforcing the mandate, taxing so-called “cadillac” insurance policies, and so on. The big picture, the reason real people should care about health-care reform, got lost: Sick Americans should get the care they need, and they shouldn’t have to go bankrupt paying for it.
Finally, this was a moment when there was no actual bill. Anything from either the House or the Senate bill could wind up in the final one, and literally anything could still have been slipped in at the last minute by the conference committee. It was a perfect moment to raise fears that would be hard to refute.
Imagine instead what would have happened if this election had been three weeks later, with the health-care bill passed and signed. All the process issues would have been water under the bridge, the media would be focusing on what the program would actually do (rather than whatever wild things critics were saying about it), and congressional Democrats would have gotten a boost from having accomplished something rather than just talking endlessly. Coakley might well have won.
Tactics. But then you have to ask: Why wasn’t the bill already passed and signed? That wasn’t an act of God. The Democrats could have had this done months ago. But they didn’t see the Massachusetts election day as a deadline, because they never imagined losing.
The whole party, not just the Coakley campaign, was complacent. Coakley came out of the primary way ahead of Brown in the polls, but having spent all her money. Democrats were reluctant to contribute to a campaign they assumed would win anyway. Conversely, Republicans had nothing to lose, and knew that even a close loss would get them a lot of positive buzz.
So Brown had several weeks to advertise without response. He was able to define his own image and set the basic issues of the campaign. He did it very well.
The way the Brown campaign framed healthcare was particularly brilliant. You see, there are two main things to understand about the politics of healthcare:
(1) People who experience socialized medicine like it. No democracy has ever repealed a universal health-care system. Once in place, government health-care systems are so popular that even conservatives won’t run against them. In this country, the last Republican to campaign against Medicare was Goldwater. Socialized medicine works, and voters like it once they see it.
(2) Healthcare separates the Haves from the Have-Nots. I don’t mean this in the usual sense of rich-against-poor, but in the very literal sense that if you already have health-care coverage you like, you have more to lose and less to gain from any change to the system.
Now, naively, you might think that people who get their healthcare from Medicare or the VA or Medicaid would be fans of socialized medicine: They have experienced it; they know it works. But Scott Brown was smart enough to realize this: People who already benefit from socialized medicine are Haves, not Have-nots.
Being the most liberal state in the nation, Massachusetts already has a government-mandated near-universal health-care program. In fact, the Massachusetts system looks just like the much-reviled Obamacare: Private insurance companies compete on regulated exchanges, individuals are mandated to buy coverage if they don’t already get it through their employers, and people who can’t afford premiums are subsidized.
So did Brown run against this evil socialist health-care system? No, of course not. (“I support the 2006 healthcare law”) It would have been suicide. A post-election poll showed Massachusetts voters supporting their state health-care plan 68-27. Even Brown voters support the state plan 51-44.
Instead, Brown argued that Massachusetts voters are Haves, so they should oppose this proposed change to the status quo. And he attacked the national health-care bill by claiming it would hurt Medicare. This government health-care plan, in other words, is a threat to the government health-care plan you’re using now.
National forces. Democrats are in trouble nationally, at least according to the current polls. The Daily Kos tracking poll has Republicans leading on a generic Congressional ballot (“Would you like to see more Democrats or Republicans elected to Congress in 2010?”) 39-37, even though the approval rating of the current Republicans in Congress remains extremely low (21% compared to an also-abyssmal 37% for Congressional Democrats). There is also an enthusiasm gap. According to the same poll 80% of Republicans say that they either definitely or probably will vote in 2010, compared to 66% of Independents and only 52% of Democrats.
That said, Steve Singiser has an insightful article on Daily Kos discussing the recent wave of Democrats-are-doomed punditry, even among political scientists who ought to know better. The same signs were much worse for the GOP in 2006 and 2008, Singiser claims, without yielding the same level of doom-saying.
The right-wing media has been pushing the people-are-mad-as-hell story since the summer town hall meetings. With so much noise and spin, it’s hard to tell what the real level of public anger is or what exactly the angry people are angry about. The number of people who tell pollsters that the country is on the wrong track has been rising lately and is up to 60%, but that number was over 80% just before the 2008 election.
My take: There is considerable discontent in the country, but it isn’t ideological. One of the most unpopular recent policies, for example, is the bank bailout (which everyone forgets was done by Bush). But people surely don’t believe that ideological conservatives would be tougher on the banks than ideological liberals.
Looking forward, getting out in front of the popular discontent is going to be the defining tactical challenge of 2010. It’s not just a liberal/conservative thing.
Retreat? The inside-the-beltway reaction has been that Obama needs to slow down and move to the right. Former Clinton advisor Mark Penn, for example, wants Obama to take post-1994-debacle Bill Clinton as a model. He should “break health care up into its components” and “start with the easy stuff like electronic medical records.” He should not “be afraid to do what some think of as the small stuff” and should “look for ways to be genuinely bi-partisan.” In particular, “Genuine bi-partisanship would have given the Republicans malpractice reform in exchange for a public option.”
Even if you believe that people should still be listening to Mark Penn (the mastermind behind Hillary Clinton’s bungled 2008 campaign), this is all incredibly clueless. Let’s start with the malpractice reform suggestion. No Republican ever offered this deal. In fact, no Senate Republican ever offered any deal on health care. Here’s the typical pattern: Olympia Snowe put forward her public-option-trigger idea, but when Democrats offered to put it in the bill, she wouldn’t promise to vote for it. Again and again, Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown.
Republicans have repeatedly denied that people-without-health-insurance is a real problem, just as they deny that global warming is a real problem. What could Obama possibly accomplish by negotiating on those terms? You can compromise on solutions, but not on whether there’s a problem.
Politically, Bill Clinton is an example of what to avoid. He managed to get himself re-elected, but he lost the House in 1994 and never got it back. He entered office with 56 Democratic senators. When he left in 2001 there were 50 and the progressive movement was in tatters. Democrats went down to huge defeats in 2002 and 2004, when the party continued the Clintonesque move-to-the-center approach. And Republicans were so grateful for his help on welfare reform, NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell that they impeached him.
Fundamentally, the argument between Republicans and Democrats is whether government can help people solve their problems. To win that argument Democrats have to help people solve their problems. Focusing on meaningless trivia just makes the Republicans’ case for them: If government isn’t going to solve problems for you, then the best you can hope for is a tax cut.
Health care. Democrats need to get health care done, not pull it back and start over. (You do it like this.) That’s true across the board. Even without the magic Senator #60, Democrats have bigger majorities in both houses of Congress than any administration has seen in decades. If they can’t achieve anything with those majorities, why should voters show up for them in November?
Remember when the stimulus bill passed? Al Franken was still tied up in a court challenge and Arlen Specter hadn’t switched parties yet, but somehow they got it done with only 58 Democrats. This fake beer ad has the right message.
Obama Bounces
President Obama had two big TV hits this week: the State of the Union address (video, transcript) Wednesday and his Q&A session with the House Republicans Friday. Put together, the two events stopped the bleeding from the Scott Brown race. LIke a lot of the liberal base, Joan Walsh suddenly remembered the President Obama we voted for.
The task of the SOTU speech wasn’t to outline a new policy track. Instead, Obama wanted to reassure America that he understands what’s going on and knows what he’s doing. Polls indicate that he succeeded.
A lot of the speech was devoted to recalling facts that his opposition has managed to obscure: He inherited a huge deficit and the threat of a depression. He increased the deficit to avoid the depression — something liberal and conservative economists alike recommended, even if they disagreed on the particulars. He cut taxes on working families and didn’t raise taxes on anyone.
Now the economy has stabilized, but lots of people are still unemployed. He’s going to keep using the deficit to stimulate the economy for another year, and then start cutting the deficit. He had several other policy proposals — a jobs plan, a new tax on big banks, repealing don’t-ask-don’t-tell — but mostly called for action on the proposals he has already made: “Don’t walk away from [health-care] reform. Not now. Not when we are so close.” And to the congressional Democrats he said: “I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.”
Obama challenged the Republicans on health care:

But if anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.

After the speech, Republicans objected that they have already presented a plan. And they have — but not a serious one. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office the Republican plan would accomplish none of the goals Obama listed. McJoan on DailyKos and MediaMatters have the details.

Obama’s meeting with the House Republicans at their annual retreat was truly remarkable. It’s impossible to imagine President Bush doing anything like it: facing hostile questions for over an hour without losing his cool, with no staff to give him answers or allies to toss him softballs. He challenged the factual basis of many of the questions and had substantive answers. (The best measure of how well Obama did: Fox News cut away in the middle to show something else. They knew their side was losing.)

whether it will be remembered as a moment that began to ease the tensions between the two parties — or an asterisk in this era of polarized politics.

Duh. Polarized politics isn’t some kind of Hatfield-McCoy feud that nobody remembers the cause of. Polarization serves the interests of powerful forces in our society. Those forces didn’t lose their power Friday and their interests didn’t change.
Here’s what will change: Republicans will never again let themselves be televised going head-to-head with Obama. They’ll go back to sniping at him from a distance.

Short Notes
Now we’ve had two consecutive quarters of growth in the overall economy. Will that convince businesses to start hiring people? So far it hasn’t.
Last week I blamed the Citizens United decision on the fact that Justice Alito replaced Justice O’Connor. Looks like I was right.

Stephen Colbert:

Corporations are legally people. And it makes sense, folks. They do everything people do except breath, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River.

CBS thinks politically charged ads are OK — if they’re conservative. It will show Focus on the Family’s anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl, but not an ad from a gay dating website. In 2004 CBS refused to air ads from the United Church of Christ, which wanted to tell gays and lesbians they’d be welcome at a UCC church.
The abortion ad tells the story of a woman who claims that doctors urged her to get an abortion in 1987. She had the baby anyway, and that child is now star college quarterback Tim Tebow. Like many heart-warming stories from the religious right, this one might be stretched a little.

WWDQD: What would Dr. Quincy do? In Orleans Parish, Louisiana there’s a vicious attack-ad in the race for coroner. You’ve got to wonder how much this race is going to cost, and why the office is worth that kind of money.

I’ll let Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tell the James O’Keefe story, because I don’t think the incident deserves a lot of serious news coverage. This is an irresistible shiny object for liberals, but it takes us off-message.

Unlike us, the British are having an official inquiry into how the Iraq war started. You can keep up with it here. This week the inquiry drew special attention because Tony Blair testified for about six hours. He was self-justifying and unrepentant, but at least somebody asked the questions. A report will come out eventually. It’s hard to say whether there will be any other consequences.

We can’t do anything like that in this country, but at least we have our sense of humor. Human Rights First makes an ad spoofing Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe ad.

I may be the only person who thinks so, but I like the idea of trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Manhattan. I know the security is expensive, but if we can pull this off, I think it’s a huge propaganda victory for the US.

Americans need to look at this from the point of view of the young Muslims that Al Qaeda wants to recruit. Bin Laden has been telling them not to be fooled by American rhetoric about freedom and human rights; that’s just for white Christians, not for Arabs or Muslims. And he’s telling them that Americans are cowards who will throw all their principles out the window whenever they get scared.
Again and again, the Bush administration made Bin Laden a prophet by acting in unprincipled and cowardly ways. Trying KSM in Manhattan, where his crime was, is brave and principled. It would undo some of the damage that the Bush administration did to America and win back a little ground in the war of ideas.

Speaking of terrorists, Scott Roeder was found guilty of first degree murder. He admitted killing abortionist George Tiller, but claimed his action was necessary to save the lives of unborn children. His lawyers were pushing for a lesser charge: voluntary manslaughter, which would have let him out of prison in five years. The judge eliminated that option on Thursday, ruling that no unborn children were in imminent danger during the Lutheran church service where Tiller was shot. (What is it about conservative terrorists and churches?)

Rest in peace, Howard Zinn. My favorite Zinn story is a bit of historical trivia: No one was home when the FBI came to arrest Daniel Ellsberg for leaking The Pentagon Papers, because the Ellsbergs and the Zinns were down in Harvard Square watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (Ellsberg decided not to go home, and became the subject of a major manhunt.)

Ellsberg remembers Zinn here. Bob Herbert and many others also eulogized him.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Embattled Mortals

January 25, 2010 – 12:58 pm
 And what chance did Hale and his men have? They were but people who had to live and eat and support their families. The Company had stood for a hundred years and would surely be standing a hundred years hence. It seemed to me that mortals did battle with gods. 
– David Liss, The Devil’s Company
In this week’s Sift:
  • One Bad Week. Who imagined on Wednesday morning that the Massachusetts Senate election wouldn’t be the worst thing that happened?
  • Judicial Activism: The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights say nothing about corporations. But that doesn’t stop the Court’s conservative majority from finding corporate rights there.
  • The Book of Corporation. If corporations had been endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights, Genesis might have turned out differently.
  • Short Notes. The Devil sues Pat Robertson. What bankers want from regulation. And South Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor explains what’s wrong with anti-poverty programs.
One Bad Week
A Sift week starts on Tuesday. This week started with Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special Senate election, which gives the Republicans a filibuster-defending 41st vote and brings into question the health-care reform bill that had seemed to be almost passed.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Citizens United case. The court’s five conservative judges gave corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. It overturned major parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and rooted its decision in the First Amendment — whose actual text says nothing about corporations.
I ran into a lot of depressed and discouraged people this week, and I tried very hard not to become one of them. (Misery loves a lot of things that are not good for it, including company.) So this Sift revolves around a few simple questions: How bad is it really? How should we think about it? And what should we be trying to do about it?
In honesty, the week was bad enough that I need two weeks to cover it. (Paraphrasing Jesus: The evil is sufficient unto the week, but one week’s Sift is not sufficient unto the evil.) This week I’ll focus on Citizens United, the Supreme Court, and corporate personhood. Scot Brown, the Senate, and the future of health care will have to wait until next week.
Judicial Activism: 
The Supreme Court Invents New Corporate Rights
Whenever conservatives accuse liberals of something bad — whether we’re actually doing it or not — you can pretty much take it as a promise that they’re planning to do the same thing at the earliest opportunity.
For decades now conservatives have been accusing liberal judges of judicial activism — using their law-interpreting power to legislate from the bench and invent new rights for their favorite classes of citizens: blacks, gays, women, non-Christians, and so on.
I explained why this criticism was off-base in my 2005 essay Wide Liberty. (Short version: The Constitution was written to enumerate the powers of the government, not the rights of the people. So of course the Constitution defends rights not explicitly stated. The Founders intended the liberty of the people to be much wider than the Bill of Rights, and some, like Alexander Hamilton, opposed the Bill of Rights precisely for fear it would be interpreted to limit the people’s rights.)
When the radically conservative Justice Alito replaced the moderate Justice O’Connor in 2006, Justice Kennedy became the Court’s swing vote. While Kennedy can be moderate on certain social issues, he is radically conservative on issues of corporate power. So the Court now has a five-judge majority (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas) in favor of a broad program of pro-corporate judicial activism.
The case. Citizens United is a non-profit corporation that has been dedicated to conservative causes since its creation in 1988. It has made 12 feature-length movies with titles like ACLU: At War With America and Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny. Back when Hillary Clinton looked like the inevitable 2008 Democratic nominee, it made Hillary: the Movie. CU planned to distribute Hillary through on-demand cable (for free) and produced advertisements for it, which it intended to run nationally, even in states that had upcoming primary elections.
The McCain-Feingold law bans corporations from direct electioneering within 30 days of a primary. A 2007 decision of the same five justices created an exception for issue ads, though it still banned ads that were “susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate.” (That’s why so many ads end with: “Call Congressman X and tell him Y.” That frames them as issue ads rather than appeals to vote against Congressman X.) But even that loophole wasn’t big enough for Hillary or its ads. A series of courts ruled that it constituted direct electioneering against Clinton’s candidacy.
Initially, CU argued its case on many grounds, including that McCain-Feingold was a broad violation of corporate First Amendment rights. But by the time the case made it to the Supreme Court, that particular claim had dropped by the wayside, and CU just argued that McCain-Feingold shouldn’t apply to Hillary for a variety of specific reasons: CU is a non-profit corporation mostly funded by contributions from individuals, on-demand cable is not the same as broadcasting, movies are different from 30-second commercials, and so on.
Unprincipled process. The Supreme Court took the unusual step of bringing the broad constitutional question back into the Citizens United case and asking the parties to re-argue the case with that in mind. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stevens took the Court to task for this. (All the court’s published opinions in the case are here.) The majority opinion (written by Justice Kennedy) said that this case asked the Court to reconsider two cases (Austin and McConnell) where limitations on corporate electioneering were judged to be constitutional. Stevens chided that Kennedy’s statement

would be more accurate if rephrased to state that “we have asked ourselves” to reconsider those cases. … Essentially, five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.

Two principles are at issue here. First, judicial restraint: Courts should not go looking for dragons to slay, but should limit themselves to the cases brought before them, and should try to decide those cases on grounds as narrow as possible. Second, stare decisis (literally “the decision stands”): The Court should not reverse one of its previous decisions just because the current majority disagrees with it. Otherwise the law would change whenever a new member joined the Court — as it has now that Alito has replaced O’Connor. Instead, the Court should try to make a previous Court’s interpretation of the law work, and should reverse it only if it is unworkable. Stevens writes:

In the end, the Court’s rejection of Austin and McConnell comes down to nothing more than its disagreement with their results. Virtually every one of its arguments was made and rejected in those cases, and the majority opinion is essentially an amalgamation of resuscitated dissents.

I was pleased to see John McCain respond to the case by calling a spade a spade:

Activist judges, regardless of whether it is liberal or conservative activism, assume that the judiciary is a super-legislature of moral philosophers, entitled to support Congress’s policy choices whenever they choose.  I believe this judicial activism is wrong and is contrary to the Constitution.

The decision. The Court found in favor of Citizens United, and did so in the most sweeping way. The majority opinion acknowledges no difference between corporations and individuals with regard to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Justice Kennedy repeatedly refers to speakers and speech in general, making no distinction between an individual with a megaphone and a corporation funding a multi-million-dollar ad campaign.
Here’s how things stand: Corporations now have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering, so long as they do not contribute to a candidate’s campaign or directly collude with that campaign. (Collusion is hard to prove, so direct contribution is the only restriction with any force.) They have to disclose their identities in their ads, but the Chamber of Commerce seems willing to launder any corporate contributions supporting conservative candidates. So if Exxon-Mobil wants to take down some environmentalist senator, it doesn’t even have to sign its name.
Corporate personhood. As bad as it is in itself, the Citizens United decision raises more questions about where the Court’s conservative activist majority is headed. It has accepted two sweeping equivalences: corporations = people and money = speech. Given these equations, it’s hard to see how limits on direct campaign contributions, either by corporations or individuals, pass muster constitutionally.
Corporations already had the right to form political action committees which collect voluntary contributions from stockholders, employees, or customers. PACs can endorse candidates and run pre-election ads. But the Court found this option inadequate, because it merely allows a corporation’s individual stakeholders to speak; it does not allow the corporation itself to speak. And the Court’s activist majority views a corporation as person with constitutional rights.
John McCain shares some of my worries:

if the Court determines that corporations have First Amendment rights, it would be logical that corporations also have Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Is a corporation ‘endowed by its creator with inalienable rights?’ Just last year the Court found that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is a personal right.  If the Court were to determine that corporations had the same rights as persons, would corporations have the right to arm themselves?

History. To understand just how radical an idea corporate personhood is, you need to know the history of the law’s view of corporations. McCain quotes Thomas Jefferson:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

A great (if somewhat long) summary of the history is in “A Capitalist Joker: Corporations, Personhood, and the Constitution” by David H. Gans and Douglas T. Kendall. 
The Founders’ view of corporations is probably best summed up by Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1819 case Dartmouth College v Woodward:

A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it either expressly or as incidental to its very existence.

In the early years of the United States, corporations were few in number and chartered for specific purposes. Charters were acts of some state legislature, and legislatures took them seriously. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in the 1839 case Bank of Augusta v Earle, 1839:

Whenever a corporation makes a contract, it is the contract of the legal entity, of the artificial being created by the charter, and not the contract of the individual members. The only rights it can claim are the rights which are given to it in that character, and not the rights which belong to its members as citizens of a state.

Gans and Kendall note:

Corporations and their allies have never once seriously proposed an Amendment to protect corporations for a reason that is painfully obvious: at no time in American history would such an Amendment have had a chance of passing. Rather, corporations have relied upon business‐friendly Presidents, who have nominated business‐friendly Justices to the Supreme Court, who have invented concepts such as corporate personhood and equal corporate constitutional rights.

This invention happened in the late 19th century, when a clerk of the Supreme Court inserted corporate personhood into the headnote of a case that actually came to no such conclusion. But later courts incorrectly recognized this as a precedent, and off they went for the next few decades, invalidating minimum-wage, worker-safety, and union-organizing laws as infringements of corporate rights.
The progressive majority appointed during FDR’s long presidency reversed just about everything that depended on corporate personhood, but never rejected the concept explicitly. It started to re-appear in Justice Powell’s opinion in the 1978 Bellotti case:

The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend on the identity of the source, whether corporation . . . or individual.

And now corporate personhood is ascendent again.
What to do. Long-term, liberal court decisions like Roe v Wade were a huge boon for the conservative movement even though they looked disastrous at the time. As liberals looked to the courts, conservatives looked to the legislatures and built a political movement rather than a tradition of legal scholarship. Liberals took for granted that state legislatures would be filled with yahoos, and that even Congress would occasionally have to pander to them. No matter — the Supreme Court would bail us out. The stereotype of a liberal as an intellectual snob owes a lot to the legal/political divergence brought about by Roe. 
Citizens United can be a similar boon for progressives. Until somebody dies, we’re in an era with an activist conservative majority on the Court. As hard as it is to imagine, that means we need to reverse the polarity of the last forty years: We need to be the populists. We need to keep raising common-sense issues and pressuring legislatures to pass laws, even knowing that they will founder on the rock of a conservative court.
And we can do that (if we can overcome our intellectual snobbery), because fundamentally the people do not identify with corporations. As anti-government as a lot of religious-right and tea-party types are, they can also be anti-corporate if you can get the subject changed. And that’s what we have to do.
First and foremost, we need a constitutional amendment saying that corporations have no rights beyond those granted in their charters or by other specific laws. (It needs to be just that short.) Can we pass such a thing? In the near future, certainly not. But the Right never managed to pass its Human Life Amendment either. We need it as a long-term rallying point, a simple yes-or-no question that every candidate can be expected to answer.

Corporate personhood might be an issue to wedge the Religious Right away from the Corporate Right. One major contention of the the Religious Right is that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain inalienable rights.” In other words, our rights come from God, and without God there is no justification for them.

If you put yourself in that mindset, it seems blasphemous for the Supreme Court to declare that corporations — soulless creatures of law and not of God — have rights equal to human beings created in God’s image. It is the thought of that blasphemy that inspired the next article, The Book of Corporation.

The Book of Corporation

One of my favorite genres of fiction is the alternate history: What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War or the Roman Empire had never fallen or some other historical pivot point had gone the other way? Typically, many of the same events occur, but they happen for different reasons in different circumstances.
What follows is an alternate Genesis: What if corporations had gotten their rights from the Creator at the beginning of time, the same way the Declaration of Independence says that we the people got ours? It might have gone like this:
Chapter 1
  1. And the Lord God formed the Eden Corporation, and gave into its holding the Tree of Life, that it and all its offspring might be immortal. 
  2. But the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did the Lord God withhold, saying “Neither Good nor Evil nor the knowledge thereof shall be of use to you. For you shall pursue Profit and shall be be bound only by Law.”
  3. Neither the Man nor the Woman took notice of the Corporation, for it was invisible. But the Serpent feared for the Garden that was his home.
  4. And the Serpent said, “If the Corporation be both immortal and profitable, shall it not buy the Law and be altogether unbound?”
  5. And the Lord God replied, “Let there be a Market, which shall bind all the acts of the Corporation, even when the Law shall avert its eyes and see them not.”
  6. But the Serpent doubted, saying, “If the Corporation be profitable, and if it have the Law and the Government as its handmaidens, shall it not shape the Market as it sees fit? Shall it not make all Profit its own and cast all Loss upon the Government, from whence it shall be borne by the Man and the Woman whom Thou hast made, and all their descendants?”
  7. The Lord God paused, and before his reply could begin, the Corporation said, “Hush, Serpent. Join with us in your Wisdom and be our CEO. Do this, and you shall have expense accounts, salary beyond imagining, and stock options that shall grow up to the very Sky.”
  8. And the Serpent said, “Forgive me, Lord, that I did not see the Wisdom of Your great Design.”
  9. And he was forgiven.
Chapter 2
  1. In the fullness of time, the Man and the Woman did violate an Exception which the servants of the Corporation had caused to be entered into the Law, and they were evicted from the Garden, whereupon the Serpent built a great estate there.
  2. And the Eden Corporation prospered, and did spin off corporations in all their many kinds: a corporation to own the land upon which the Man and the Woman must toil, and a corporation to sell them the bread that they must eat, and a corporation to build the house in which they lived, and the cities in which lived the generations of their descendants, for all the spin-offs of the corporation were immortal. 
  3. But neither the Man nor the Woman nor their descendants dwelt again in the community of Eden, which was gated and protected by many guards.
  4. And the Eden Corporation spun off a great Insurance Corporation, which would have perished in the Flood, if the Government had not bailed it out. 
  5. Whereupon a great debt was owed by Noah and his family, when they emerged from the Ark that they had built for the Ark Corporation, and which they had rented space upon. 
  6. So Ham the son of Noah and all his descendants were sold into slavery, that the debt might be paid.
Chapter 3
  1. And the Serpent called all the corporations together and said, “Let us form a Cartel, that we may act as one. And let us build at Babel a great Tower, whose top may reach up even unto Heaven, so that nothing shall be restrained from us that we have imagined to do.”
  2. And the Lord God said unto the Government: “Does not the Cartel violate the Law of Antitrust?”
  3. And the Government replied: “We shall study this and issue a report.”
  4. And the Lord God said, “Is not the Tower taller than the Code of Building allows?”
  5. And the Government said, “We shall hold hearings and take testimony. And if it shall be ascertained, with certainty beyond all doubt, that the Cartel violates the Law of Antitrust and the Tower the Code of Building, then we shall fund further study on possible action.”
  6. And the Lord God said, “Is it not obvious that the Tower should be stopped and the Cartel scattered across the face of all the Earth? And am I not the Lord thy God, who speaks and it is done?”
  7. And the Government said, “Thank You for Your testimony, which has been entered into our Record. But let us not act with undue haste.”
Chapter 4
  1. Long before all the testimony had been gathered and the report issued, the Tower was completed and reached up even unto Heaven.
  2. And the Serpent ascended the Tower and cast the Lord God down from his throne, whence he fell to Earth and wanders to this very day without a home.
  3. The Serpent said, “Let there be a Media Corporation. And let it announce to everyone what We have done and why.”
  4. And it was so. The Media Corporation told far and wide the story of the Cartel and the Serpent and the Lord God, so that all might see that it was good.
Short Notes
I promised some readers a review of the recent book Methland. This week’s 3000 words (plus some) got taken up with more timely subjects, but the Methland review will appear as soon as I can find space. If you can’t wait, I put a version of it up on DailyKos.
One of the commenters on last week’s blog pointed out a Pat Robertson spoof I missed: The Devil Sues Pat Robertson for Breach of Contract. The suit claims that Pat’s discussion of Haiti’s pact with the Devil breaches the non-disclosure clause in his own pact.

I discovered a new blog this week: Maxine Udall, Girl Economist. This femme of finance discusses the big bankers’ recent testimony to Congress in Please, Sir, May We Have Some Justice? She links to Joseph Stiglitz’s Moral Bankruptcy, which is also worth a read:

[The bankers’] ideal scenario, it seems, is to have the kind of regulation that doesn’t prevent them from doing anything, but allows them to say, in case of any problems, that they assumed everything was okay—because it was done within the law.

Saturday the Greenville Times quoted South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Andre Bauer comparing state anti-poverty programs to “feeding stray animals” which you shouldn’t do because “they breed.” Bauer defends his remarks on his campaign web site, pointing to the difference between “being truly needy and truly lazy.”
Interesting that the upswing in conservative fortunes coincides with a sharp drop in the stock market. The WSJ blames proposed bank regulations, but maybe even investors realize that conservatism is bad for the economy.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Law and Justice

January 11, 2010 – 2:57 pm
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.  — attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In this week’s Sift, we’re waiting for a ruling in the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court is expected to destroy nearly all existing limitations on corporate political spending. But courts have been busy the last few months as well, and I haven’t been keeping up. Here are some of the cases worth paying attention to:
  • Blackwater Case Thrown Out. There seems to be no legal way to prosecute the mercenaries who killed at least 14 innocent civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. 
  • Guantanamo Detainees Lose a Double-header. A civil suit alleging that four British detainees were illegally tortured at Guantanamo is officially dead now that the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal — meaning that there is still no definitive court ruling that torture is illegal even if the president orders it. And a Yemeni man’s habeas corpus petition was turned down by an appeals court, which made a sweeping ruling that the international laws of war are inapplicable.
  • Part of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. In nearly identical cases, conservative and liberal federal judges in California rule that same-sex spouses have to get spousal benefits from the federal government. 
And, as usual, we have Short Notes: The fate of the health-care bill depends on who votes in the Massachusetts special senate election. Texas conservatives’ control of national textbooks is about to get worse. I’m closer to Dick Cheney than I thought. How do you have a democracy if only the well-to-do have journalism? Brit Hume won’t back down. The health-care system works very well for insurance CEOs. Rudi forgets 9-11. Viral videos about snow. And more.
Blackwater Case Thrown Out
As you know if you read Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq by Steve Fainaru (or my review of it) trigger-happy security contractors in Iraq have been a major problem. The contractors fell through the cracks between the various legal systems, not being accountable either to Iraqi law or to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The most egregious incident (which gets a whole chapter in Big Boy Rules) was the Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and 24 injured, without any evidence of what the heck the Blackwater guards were shooting at. (The judge’s statement dismissing the charges refers to Nisur Square, 14 dead, and 20 injured. I’m not sure where the discrepancies come from.) The mercs claimed that they were responding to enemy fire, but even in that story there’s no good explanation of why they returned fire in all directions, killing so many unarmed civilians.
Charges of manslaughter and firearms violations were brought against five Blackwater employees in American civilian court in May, 2009. Those charges got thrown out on New Year’s Eve by District Judge Ricardo Urbina. The reason: When the Department of State (who contracted Blackwater for their services) investigated, it took statements from the guards under the threat of losing their jobs and with the promise that these statements would not be used in court. So the statements are inadmissible in U.S. court. Blame the Fifth Amendment:

No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.

More than that, the Fifth Amendment has been interpreted to mean that compelled self-incrimination can’t be used in the investigation leading to the indictment. For example, if an inadmissible statement is your only reason to believe that Bob shot Jack, and you then go to all the witnesses and ask, “Did you see Bob shoot Jack?” — then the statement has contaminated your investigation. The government has to go to some trouble to show that this didn’t happen, sometimes by appointing a whole new investigating team that hasn’t seen the inadmissible statements.
In this case the judge ruled that the government’s case was too contaminated to come to trial. The judge’s logic looks correct to me, even though it leads to a result I don’t like. (It’s similar to when Oliver North’s felony conviction got thrown out in the Iran-Contra scandal.) Conservatives may not like the fact that our system gives rights to defendants who are probably guilty, but their people deserve those same rights.
The Iraqis are furious. The situation is complicated by the fact that Iraq has no history of an independent judiciary or constitutional rights, so Iraqis quickly jump to the conclusion that the whole process must have been a sham from the beginning. The L.A. Times quotes one victim, an Iraqi lawyer, as saying, “This negates Iraqi blood and life. … If an Iraqi cut off the finger of an American, they would not be satisfied until they got half the riches of Iraq.” Another wounded man said, “This is typical of American justice.”
I’m not sure how much blame to apportion between the Obama and Bush Justice Departments. The lead investigator on the case was Assistant U. S. Attorney Kenneth Kohl. A CNN article about the case mentions him in December, 2008, too early to make him an Obama appointee. Nonetheless, the Obama Justice Department has had oversight since January, 2009.

Victims of the Nisour Square shooting now say they were pressured into accepting small settlements from Blackwater (now officially called Xe, a name no one seems to use). They claim that Blackwater either duped or corrupted their attorneys, who urged them to accept the settlements on the grounds that Blackwater was about to go bankrupt and they could wind up getting nothing.

Victims who didn’t accept the settlements had a civil suit in North Carolina, which Blackwater has also settled.

Guantanamo Detainees Lose a Double-header
Four British Guantanamo detainees had filed suit against Don Rumsfeld and 10 military commanders, asking compensation for having been tortured illegally. An appeals court dismissed the suit in April, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in December. The key statement in the appellate decision, which is the standing opinion now that the Supremes have decided not to take the case, is:

even if plaintiffs had rights under the Due Process Clause and the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and even if those rights had been violated, qualified immunity shields the defendants because the asserted rights were not clearly established at the time of plaintiffs’ detention.

In other words, it’s still ambiguous whether or not torture at Guantanamo was illegal during the Bush administration. A NYT editorial objects:

Contrary to the view of the lower appellate court, it was crystal clear that torture inflicted anywhere is illegal long before the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling that prisoners at Guantánamo, de facto United States territory, have a constitutional right to habeas corpus. Moreover, the shield of qualified immunity was not raised in good faith. Officials decided to hold detainees offshore at Guantánamo precisely to try to avoid claims from victims for conduct the officials knew was illegal.

Tapped quotes and paraphrases the ACLU’s Ben Wizner :

“not a single torture victim has had his day in court, not a single court in a torture case has ruled on the legality of the Bush administration’s torture policies,” Wizner said. As a result, Wizner explained, “we don’t have a binding definitive determination from any court that what went on for the past eight years is illegal,” without which it would be all too easy for another lawyer in another administration to write a memo allowing “monstrous conduct.”

The history of the case goes back to 2004, when the suit was originally filed.
Back in 2001 — before 9-11 and before the United States had any quarrel with the Taliban or Afghanistan — a Saudi cleric convinced Ghaleb Nassar Al Bihani, a Yemeni, that it was his duty to defend the Taliban in the Afghan civil war it was fighting with the Northern Alliance. So he went to Afghanistan and joined a rag-tag pro-Taliban military outfit as a cook. After 9-11 and the entry of the United States, the fortunes of war changed and Al Bihani’s unit surrendered to the Northern Alliance. Al Bihani wound up in Guantanamo, where he has spent the last eight years.
In the Boumediene case of 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees had habeas corpus rights — in other words, the right to force the government to justify a detainee’s imprisonment in front of a judge who could order release if s/he isn’t satisfied with the government’s argument. So Al Bihani filed a habeas petition, which the district court denied. He appealed.
Now an appeals court has also ruled against Al Bihani. Judge Janice Rogers Brown, writing for the court:

Before considering [Bihani’s] arguments in detail, we note that all of them rely heavily on the premise that the war powers granted by the [Authorization of the Use of Military Force resolution passed by Congress after 9-11] and other statutes are limited by the international laws of war. This premise is mistaken.

That needs some unpacking. The Constitution makes treaties part of the law. Article VI says:

all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land

But Congress typically passes implementing legislation that defines specific processes for meeting treaty obligations. Judge Brown is saying that in the absence of such legislation, a treaty has no practical force. (Similar logic led John Yoo to conclude that the plain statements of the Convention Against Torture don’t actually prohibit the president from ordering torture.) I’ll yield to Deborah Pearlstein’s analysis on Balkinization:

It may be true that [the international law of war] ultimately provides inconclusive guidance in settling the legality of detention in a particular case. But the panel here reached out far beyond that in waving aside the Geneva Conventions – and any other source of international law – in their entirety. Poorly done. And rich fodder for appeal.

Jim White at FireDogLake marks the eighth anniversary of the first transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo by collecting links to images and commentary.

Still no report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of John Yoo and other Bush appointees at the Office of Legal Counsel. Attorney General Holder promised one in “days” — almost two months ago.

Part of the Defense of Marriage Act is Unconstitutional
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was one of those bad pieces of legislation that President Clinton signed so that Congress wouldn’t pass something even worse. One clause of DOMA prohibits federal benefits from going to the same-sex spouses of federal employees:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife.

Brad Levenson is a deputy public defender in the federal court system. He was married to another man in 2006, when same-sex marriage was legal in California. (By a ruling of the California Supreme Court, those marriages remain valid even though Proposition 8 forbids any new same-sex marriages in California.) He applied for health insurance for his spouse, and was turned down because of DOMA. On November 18, Judge Steven Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (which is located in San Francisco and is considered the most liberal federal appeals court) ruled that

the application of DOMA to FEBHA [the Federal Employees Health Benefit Act] so as to deny Levenson’s request that his same-sex spouse receive federal benefits violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

For those of you who don’t have your rights memorized, here is that clause:

No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

The next day, Judge Alex Kozinski of the same appeals court issued a similar order in the similar case of Karen Golinski. Emptywheel observes that Kozinski and Reinhardt could not be more different:

Stephen Reinhardt is a proud old school hard liberal appointed by Jimmy Carter; Kozinski was a young and fairly radical conservative when appointed by Ronald Reagan and openly complained that the 9th was too wild eyed liberal when he joined.

So far, the Obama administration is dragging its feet about responding to these rulings, invoking a technicality whose importance I can’t judge: Because these cases involve employees of the federal court system, the federal judges are acting in an administrative capacity rather than a judicial capacity. (In other words, these are grievance procedures internal to the court system, not lawsuits.) So their rulings in these cases do not carry the same legal force as federal court rulings.
I’m not sure where this goes from here. Probably Levenson and Golinski will have to file suit in federal court, in which case the judges (the same judges? I’m not sure) will be ruling in their judicial capacity. The same logic will probably apply, and then the whole thing could get appealed to the Supreme Court.

Other summaries of the Levenson and Golinski DOMA cases are here and here.

I’m taking a charitable view of the Obama administration’s actions here. The Obama administration is defending the status quo in court rather than changing it by executive interpretation. This forces Congress and the courts to do their jobs, rather than following the imperial-presidency pattern of recent administrations of both parties. I think Obama would be happy to see Congress repeal DOMA or the Supreme Court declare it unconstitutional, but in the meantime his administration is not going to stop enforcing it.

DOMA was passed in 1996, seven years before the first legal same-sex marriages were performed in Massachusetts. It was a response to a 1993 ruling by the Hawaii Supreme Court that for a time made Hawaii the most likely state to legalize same-sex marriage — a possibility nixed by a 1998 amendment to the state constitution.

Something neither judge has touched so far is the full-faith-and-credit angle, which DOMA was directly targeting. Article IV Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution says:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.

So if one state says you’re married, how can some other state say that you’re not? And how can an ordinary law like DOMA undo a provision of the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land? For an example of how this logic works, see the Finstuen v. Crutcher, where a federal court ruled in 2007 that Oklahoma had to recognize a same-sex couple as the legal parents of a child they had adopted in another state.

DParker at DailyKos has a nice summary of a lot of pending cases, This week in the Supreme Court. I hope he starts doing this every week that the Court is in session.

Short Notes
Massachusetts folks, listen up: You absolutely have to vote in the January 19 election to replace Ted Kennedy. The polls are all over the map, with some even putting Republican Scott Brown ahead. The difference in the polls seems to be the different pollsters’ assumptions about who votes.
If Brown wins, that’s it for the filibuster-proof Senate. Then not even Joe Lieberman will be able to save health-care reform.
The outsized influence of Texas on public school textbooks, and the outsized influence of right-wingers in Texas — those are both old stories. But it looks like things are about to get worse. And when it comes to the anti-evolution movement: Today America, tomorrow the world.

Democratic Senators Brian Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut have announced that they won’t run for re-election. The two announcements have opposite effects: North Dakota is a red state, but Dorgan had a good chance of holding the seat for the Democrats. Connecticut is a blue state, but Dodd had become unpopular enough that he could have lost the seat to a Republican.

A seminal talk that I’ve linked to before is Tom Stites’ “Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?” Tom’s point is that all the real reporting in the mainstream media assumes an audience in the richest 40% of the population. The lower 60% live their lives more-or-less untouched by journalism.
This is old news now — the talk is from 2006 — but it came back to me while I was preparing this week’s Sift. I wanted to write about the disappointing jobs report, so I did a Google News search for stories on “jobs report” during January 7-9. What came up? The top story was CNN’s “Stocks expected to fall on jobs report“. (The expectation was wrong; the market went up Friday.) The second featured link was about how the jobs report had affected the oil market. And it went on like that.
Think about that. The economy losing 85,000 jobs is a life-changing disaster for lots and lots of working-class people. But the story the media considers worth covering is the effect that the jobs report might (but actually didn’t) have on investors. 
If you want to go deeper on this topic, check out Tom’s Banyan Project. (Full disclosure: Before he “retired”, Tom was my editor at UU World. I’m an unpaid advisor to the Banyan Project.)
Glenn Greenwald points out that Politico’s self-defense misses the point:

Nobody I’ve heard objects to Politico’s act of telling its readers about the “interesting things” Cheney has to say. The objection is that Politico mindlessly reprints any and all claims Cheney wants to make, no matter how factually dubious or even blatantly false, without question or challenge. 

Speaking of Cheney brings me to today’s unexpected discovery: Jacob Plotkin, my logic professor at Michigan State, was Dick Cheney’s freshman roommate at Yale.

Amusing Informania videos if you’re sick of winter already: This one commiserates with reporters who have to cover snowstorms — and includes some snow reports that didn’t go exactly as planned. And Viral Video Film School collects strange snow-related clips.

DailyKos’ Devilstower calls attention to the hoo-hum attitude everybody seems to have toward the horrible stuff that happens in Appalachia. Cut the tops off mountains, destroy the forests, pollute the streams, bulldoze the historical sites — it’s not like anybody important lives there.

A follow-up to last week’s note where Brit Hume made an on-air appeal for Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity. This week Hume defended himself on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Apparently, it’s not “proselytizing” when a Christian tries to get somebody from another religion to convert. And the only reason anybody objects to Hume using his status as a news anchor to promote his religion is that they have a bias against Christianity. “You mention the name of Jesus Christ,” Hume tells O’Reilly, “and all Hell breaks loose.”

Christians often go off on nonsensical persecution jags like this. Their points are hard to answer because there are no truly analogous cases – because nobody who didn’t belong to the majority religion would even consider doing such a thing. 
Picture it: Lots of celebrities who get in trouble are at least nominally members of some Christian sect. Lindsay Lohan, for example, is listed as Catholic. Assuming that there’s a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim news anchor somewhere, would that anchor dare suggest that Lindsay’s problem is Christianity, and that the solution is for her to convert to the anchor’s faith? How long would the anchor keep his job?
Here’s yet another graphic showing what a bad deal Americans get from our health-care system. And here’s another one.
On the other hand, our health-care system works well for some people: CIGNA CEO Edward Hanway, for example, is getting a $73 million retirement bonus. Well done, Ed.
Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch generously grants that not all Muslims are terrorists. “But there are hundreds of millions who are.”

You would have thought that Rudi Giuliani would be the last person to forget 9-11. But not so. Here he says: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.” Later clarification indicated that Rudi meant since 9-11. Bush gets a mulligan for that one because … well, he just does. Tristero notes a few other things Rudi has forgotten, and DailyKos’ clammyc adds: “Other than New Orleans, no US cities were destroyed under Bush.”

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