Category Archives: Weekly summaries

Each week, a short post that links to the other posts of the week.

One Purpose

May 23, 2016 – 10:18 am

Whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team, and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. … Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.

— Hillary Clinton, 2008 Democratic Convention (8-26-2008)

This week’s featured post is “Fears of Democratic Disunity: talking myself down“.

This week everybody was talking about a plane crash

The usual news sites can be confusing places to keep track of an unfolding story like the loss of EgyptAir Flight 804. They focus too much on what information is new today, and it’s often hard to tell whether they’re reporting or speculating. I recommend checking the Wikipedia page from time to time. That way you get the whole story as it is currently understood.

and whether the Democrats can unify

In the featured post, I let my fears run wild and then talk myself down.

while the Republicans unite around Trump

Interesting article in The Atlantic about Trump’s message to coal country versus Clinton’s.

[Trump’s] plan is very easy to envision: You’ll have your job back, and your old lives. This is the power of Trump’s blame-based worldview. When curing a community’s malaise is as simple as getting rid of the bad actor who caused it—in this case, Obama’s environmental regulations—the rewards feel more certain, more tangible.

“When you say, ‘I’m going to give your job back,’ that’s a very immediate solution to the problem,” said Erin Cassese, an associate professor of political science at West Virginia University. “If you want to find fault with Clinton’s plan or Sanders’s plan, it’s that they’re really vague. People don’t have a clear vision of what their lives are going to be like in four years. It’s more abstract, and that’s why it has less resonance with voters.”

The problem is that Trump’s plan has almost no chance of success. A U.S. president has no power to stoke global demand for coal, or pump up the price of natural gas; the most Trump could do is repeal Obama’s environmental rules, and economists agree that would have a minimal effect on employment.

In the fall campaign, that’s going to be the argument across the board. Clinton will offer a detailed program to make things better than they are now; Trump will pledge to make things right again, but offer either no plan or one based in fantasy. It’s going to be a serious test of the wisdom of the electorate.

Trump put out a list of the 11 white people he would consider nominating to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. In general, conservatives consider this a good list and liberals don’t, but getting into that argument misses the obvious: Once in office, Trump will do what he wants, independent of anything he’s said in past or is saying now.

Look at what we’ve already seen: He publishes a tax plan, and then distances himself from it. One of his top surrogates now says his Mexican Wall would be “virtual” and his deportation promise “rhetorical”. As Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball put it:

Tackling Trump on the issues will be tricky because he just changes his positions all the time.

So in January, if Trump pulls a Caligula and nominates his horse to the Court, I can imagine what he’ll say if anybody mentions this list. “That was a good list, a great list, and those 11 judges are really top people, totally first rate. But America’s Greatness — have you seen him? — what a horse he is!”

but a lot of important things have been happening the in the world while we’ve been focused on presidential politics (and bathrooms)

I haven’t given this stuff nearly the attention it deserves. Fortunately, Vox been on the case.

Brexit. The European Union is at a tricky point. Its member countries are unified enough that the EU limits the actions of the national governments, but not so unified as to provide the kind of benefits that, say, the states of the US see from our federal government. (For example, if our states had the kind of loose relationship EU countries do, Florida might have had to go bankrupt in the 2008 real estate crash, or New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.)

Previously, this has come to a head with regard to the Greek economic crisis, and the “Greek exit” option got smushed down to “Grexit”. (Greece decided to stay in the EU for now.) Now Britain, a much larger, richer economy, is facing a referendum to leave the EU.

Britain has always had an ambivalent relationship with the European mainland, which is symbolized by the fact that it has retained the pound, rather than merge into the EuroZone. That limits some of the hassle of being in the EU, and would limit some of the impact of a Brexit. (For example, Britain’s national debt is in its own currency, which it could print if it needed a quick way out of a debt crisis. Greece, on the other hand, owes Euros, which it doesn’t control.)

Vox has a good explanatory article. An exit vote on the UK referendum on June 23 would trigger the negotiation of an exit agreement with the EU, which would then have to be approved. So the referendum is a move towards exit, but not a direct exit.

The biggest worry, though, isn’t Brexit itself, but the larger nationalistic process it might be part of.

Brexit is the British manifestation of a broader popular revolt against European integration that is gradually spreading across Europe. If the British people choose to abandon the EU at this vulnerable moment, it might well be the catalyst that causes the cancer of populism and disintegration — which is helping to drive this campaign in the UK — to metastasize across Europe at a dramatically faster rate.

The Brazilian impeachment. Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff has been impeached by the Senate, which under the Brazilian system means that she immediately steps down until cleared.

This is a weird story about Brazil’s weird version of democracy, in which a clear majority of Congress is under investigation for corruption.

Ever since colonial times, Brazil has been dominated by wealthy elites who thought they could get away with anything — mostly because they usually did.

Rousseff probably will be removed permanently, and it’s hard to feel too bad about that, because she is corrupt. But she might well be less corrupt than either the people who are impeaching her or the VP who will take over.

The Zika virus. Brazil is also ground zero for an outbreak of the Zika virus.

But Zika isn’t just somebody else’s problem. There’s already been a death in Puerto Rico, and much of the Southern U.S. is at risk. The Obama administration has asked for $1.9 billion to fight the disease, but this apparently is the kind of “wasteful government spending” that Republicans feel obliged to block. The Senate is trying to pass a $1.1 billion bill, while the House is only willing to spend $622 million — and funding it by taking the money away from anti-Ebola work. God forbid that we increase our public health budget just because there’s a public health problem.

Puerto Rico. It looks like Congress will pass a bill to deal with the Puerto Rican debt crisis. Matt Yglesias describes the proposal as “in effect … bankruptcy” because the lenders and bond holders will get less than 100% of what they’re owed on paper. No federal money is appropriated to bail anybody out.

and you might also be interested in

Larry Wilmore appeared on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show Wednesday, and an interesting point came up: We’re at the point where people will start wondering what history will make of the Obama administration.

Like Wilmore, I think Obama is going to come out pretty well. Not only is ObamaCare ultimately going to be remembered as a major accomplishment, but he’s going to get credit for the way he held things together in the face of the horrible conditions he inherited from Bush and unprecedented obstruction from the opposing party.

Anyway, more about that in January. But it seemed like a good time to review my end-of-term assessment of George W. Bush in 2009. I’m standing by all of it: In hindsight, I don’t see any reason to look more kindly on what he did.

Oklahoma’s legislature just passed a bill criminalizing abortion, but the governor vetoed it. I think of these sorts of laws as Lawyer Full Employment acts. The only thing they accomplish is to create court cases whose outcomes are known before they begin.

George Zimmerman just sold the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin for $250,000. This looks to me like a pioneering transaction that brings a whole new market into the capitalist system. Imagine the possibilities: “Of course I didn’t hire that guy to kill my parents (and besides, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him). But after I got my inheritance, how could I turn down the opportunity to own an artifact of such personal significance to my family?”

and let’s close with something unexpected

The sidewalks of Boston are covered with secret poems that you can only see when it rains.

By weeklysift | Comments (5)

Truth and Fantasy

May 16, 2016 – 11:00 am

I play to people’s fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.

— Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987)

This week’s featured post is “Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump-Ryan meeting

Trump dominated the news cycle even more than usual this week. His meeting with Paul Ryan was covered like an international summit, even though there was really nothing to say about it: We’re not sure what they talked about and nobody expected a clear result. It sounds like they have agreed to agree at some point in the future, though the content of that agreement has been left open.

In general, and with a few notable exceptions, this was the week when elected Republicans realized they have no choice: Trump is their nominee, and his positions are vague enough to leave room for imagining that he will do something they’ll like.

Trump is still refusing to release his tax returns, giving very implausible excuses for his refusal.

It’s hard to imagine what could be in there that is worse than what the media is already imagining. I think the most likely thing we’d learn is that he’s not nearly so rich as he claims. Using a separate source of information, Crane’s New York Business argues that his annual income must be less than $500K.

The NYT did a deeply researched article into Trump’s interactions with women. Trump thinks it’s a hit piece, but it actually captures some of the ambivalence of his character: On the one hand, Trump made room for women to advance in his organization, giving them opportunities they would not easily find elsewhere in the real-estate-development business. On the other, he feels like this should give him cover when he misbehaves, which he frequently does.

The other Trump news story falls into the WTF category: The Washington Post released a tape of a 1991 conversation in which Trump is posing as his own publicist and talking to a gossip columnist. The conversation is largely about all the women who either want Trump or want him back.

I’m a bit at a loss about how much importance to give this. It doesn’t fall into any of the usual political-scandal categories. It’s more like: “Who does that kind of thing?” I’m reminded of the damaging YouTube of John Edwards primping his hair.

Trump’s response is more telling than the story itself: He reiterated his threat that the Trump administration would start an antitrust case against Amazon, whose owner (Jeff Bezos) also owns the WaPo. Josh Marshall comments:

Let’s all take stock of this being a thing: Donald Trump routinely threatens to use government power (DOJ, IRS, etc.) to attack his personal enemies once he becomes President.

In other words, Trump openly promises to do what Republican propagandists and fever swamp nutballs have pretended or imagine Democratic presidents do.

and polls

Lots of Democrats freaked when a Quinnipiac poll showed tight Clinton/Trump races in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — i.e., the states that have been the deciders in most recent elections.

Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie dug into the numbers to see what was going on, and discovered something interesting: Quinnipiac is assuming that these states will have a significantly whiter electorate than in 2008 or 2012.

The standard narrative for nonwhite voting in a presidential year is this: Before Barack Obama, blacks and Latinos turned out to vote in modest and static numbers. After Obama’s 2008 campaign, they began to vote in droves, transforming the American electorate. Now, with Obama and his historic candidacy off of the ballot, they’ll return to the sidelines.

Every part of this narrative is wrong.

To me, the compelling part of Bouie’s counter-narrative is the Hispanic vote, where turnout is traditionally low, but went up to 50% in 2008 and 48% in 2012. Somehow, I think Trump is going to inspire a lot of Hispanic voter turnout.

So the Q poll should be read as more of a cautionary tale than a prediction: If Democrats forget about non-white turnout, or if Clinton makes the mistake of competing too hard for the angry white voter and blurs the choice between herself and Trump, things could get close.

In general, you shouldn’t let yourself get too upset by any one poll. The media has a tendency to publicize polls precisely because they say something unexpected. (In the primaries, any poll showing Sanders unexpectedly close to Clinton made headlines, while polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead didn’t.) In practice, that means that the polls you’re most likely to hear about are the outliers, the ones fall outside the range of the other polls. Those are precisely the ones you should be most suspicious of.

and bathrooms

The Obama administration has sent a letter to all the school districts in the country, warning them that bathroom rules discriminating against transgender students (like the ones mandated in North Carolina by HB2) will be seen as violations of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Vox has an informative article about this.

[Until they are tested in court] the Obama administration’s guidelines are simply a legally non-binding guidance. Still, they suggest that the Obama administration will attempt legal action against violators. And if courts do ultimately rule in the administration’s favor, schools and states could lose billions in federal education funding for violating civil rights laws — a position no public official wants to be caught in.

The article also contains a map showing all the states where some kind of transgender-rights protection already exists. In other words, there’s no reason why opponents of trans rights need to make up hypothetical examples of men claiming to be trans so that they can enter women’s bathrooms and locker rooms for whatever nefarious purposes. If such things are going to happen, they should already be happening all over the country.

For example, last week I watched Bill O’Reilly raise these kinds of fears on his TV show. Bill’s show comes out of New York, where the law already includes protections of trans rights. So if trans rights cause a problem, he’s perfectly situated to report on that problem, not speculate hypothetically about it.

Religion writer Jonathan Merritt has written an interesting article about how the religious right is playing this issue. His claim is that they learned nothing from their battles against gay rights, and so they’re making all the same mistakes: They’re making abstract arguments based on dogma and stereotypes, and aren’t paying attention either to the experiences of real people or to what science is finding out.

When it comes to transgender issues, conservative Christians advocate for a privileged majority that is not currently under threat while ignoring the plight of an oppressed minority that is currently being harassed. Are you starting to see the parallels to the way Christian activists bungled the gay rights fight?

In the early 2000s I began predicting that the battle over gay marriage was already over. My conservative friends called me crazy, but time proved who was right. Because conservative Christians seem hellbent on perpetually making the same mistakes ad infinitum, today I’m predicting that the transgender conversation is over. And once again, conservative Christians will be the authors of their own demise.

Scare tactics only work until real experience starts to develop. Conservative Christians could claim anything they wanted about same-sex marriage leading to the fall of Civilization as long as no states had legalized it. But eventually you could go to Massachusetts or Canada and see for yourself that Civilization was doing just fine.

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Mistakes are bigger in Texas. This TCU typo is the worst since the commencement of the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Pubic Affairs in 2012. I’m not making that one up either.

Also in Texas: An 8th-grade girl in Houston was held by police after she tried to buy her school lunch with a $2 bill her grandmother had given her. The bill failed the current counterfeiting test because it was printed in 1953. The link (from the local ABC affiliate) tells of numerous other cases in which school officials and police have treated students like adult felons rather than give them the benefit of the doubt while an anomaly is investigated. Oddly, this seems to happen almost entirely to non-white students.

West Virginia Democrats are a confusing bunch. In their presidential primary, they picked Sanders over Clinton 51%-36%. But on the same day, in the governor’s race, they nominated a billionaire coal baron who denies global warming and has a history of safety violations in his mines.

and let’s close with something big

A life-size Foosball game.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Say Never

May 9, 2016 – 9:45 am

This is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after.

— David Brooks, “If Not Trump, What?” (4-29-2016)

This week’s featured post is “What Will Republicans Do Now?“

If you’re wondering where I was last week, check out the Mayday service I gave at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.

These last two weeks, everybody has been talking about the end of the Republican primary campaign

Two weeks ago, the plan to stop Donald Trump at the convention was still iffy, but didn’t seem completely daft. Then very quickly, Trump won the Middle Atlantic primaries by wide margins and Cruz collapsed in Indiana. Suddenly Cruz and Kasich were out and Trump was the last man standing.

I talk about the still-splintered Republican Party in the featured post.

Before Cruz went out, though, he unleashed the kind of scathing diatribe you can’t take back, calling Trump a “pathological liar” who “lies [with] practically every word that comes out of his mouth”.

In a response that I think comes straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying. … And it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing.

This is actually a sound insight. In particular, I think it applies to Trump’s recent attack on Hillary Clinton:

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card.

Reverse that and see how much better it fits. Would anyone support Donald Trump if he weren’t a white man? Isn’t he constantly playing the white man card, stoking up white male resentment against Hispanics, against women, against blacks, against Middle Easterners?

Another frequent Trump claim is that Hillary either will or should be indicted over the email affair. But the more we learn, the more clear it is that she broke no laws. It is Trump, on the other hand, who has a legal problem: The Trump University fraud lawsuit will be heard shortly after the election.

and political comedy

At his last White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama proved once again that he has a career in stand-up waiting, if he wants it.

And Jimmy Kimmel did a funny but effective piece about climate change.

The Daily Show turned real Donald Trump quotes into a rap video.

That video illustrates one reason I think liberals will do better against Trump than conservatives did: Trump deserves to be laughed at, and we have much better comedians.

Meanwhile, the last week of the Ted Cruz campaign was full of unintentional yucks: Ted accidentally elbowed his wife in the face. His would-be VP, Carly Fiorina, diverted attention from the entrance of the Cruz family by falling off the stage. And in a WTF moment, Carly started singing. When Hollywood eventually makes a comedy about the 2016 campaign, those moments will have to be included.

and Puerto Rico

The first time I noticed that Puerto Rico had a debt problem was when I started seeing this ad:

It was paid for by one of those dark-money groups with an amorphous name: the Center for Individual Freedom. So of course you can trust everything they tell you.

To get a better idea of what’s involved, watch this John Oliver segment (which features Puerto-Rican-born Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton).

The general theme here is the problem of colonialism: Puerto Rico may have its own government, but the rules it operates under are circumscribed by what Congress allows, and Congress often makes new rules affecting Puerto Rico either by accident (just failing to mention it in the law) or in order to achieve some purpose on the mainland, with the effect on the island being mostly an afterthought.

Right now, Puerto Rico owes $70 billion, or about $20,000 per person. The debt simply can’t be paid, and as the laws currently stand, the island’s government has to pay its bonds before providing services like public health and education. If they do that, it seems clear that people will die; that’s why they’re currently in violation of the law.

Mainlanders who want to write Puerto Ricans off because they’re Hispanics might want to think again: Since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, all its people are American citizens. They don’t have to cross any borders or jump any walls to resettle in your town; they just need a plane ticket.

and Cinco de Mayo

For an explanation of why wearing a sombrero, eating nachos, and drinking too much tequila is not a proper way for Anglos to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, listen to Liz Martinez , or watch this:

For what Cinco de Mayo really means, see Wikipedia.

For non-Hispanic Americans, Cinco de Mayo should be an annual opportunity to think about cultural appropriation, the tendency of powerful cultures to steal anything that looks like fun from less powerful cultures. (I discussed this a few years ago in “A Brief Meditation on White Twerking“.) Done badly, the powerful culture’s megaphone drowns out the authentic tradition, ruining practices and celebrations for the people they ought to belong to.

There are respectful ways to mark holidays of cultures you don’t belong to. For example, if you’re a Gentile and your Jewish friends invite you over for a Passover Seder, you can attend without worrying about cultural appropriation, as long as you don’t try to make yourself the center of attention. That’s way different from dressing up like Moses and inviting a bunch of other Gentiles over to eat matzo shaped like the 10 commandments and drink a lot of Manischewitz.

The question is who’s in control. One key symptom of privilege is the tendency to assume that you ought to be in control. If someone else is offended by what you do, you’ll be the judge of whether their objection is justified. You’ll examine your own intentions, and if you decide you meant well, that’s all that matters. If that doesn’t satisfy some people, well, that’s their problem.

You can see that process at work in Washington Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder: He knows he doesn’t intend to insult Native Americans, so if they take offense they’re just wrong. “The truth is on our side,” he says.

A current example is Donald Trump’s Cinco de Mayo tweet. All the elements of cultural appropriation are on display: A white guy eats a white imitation of Mexican food while proclaiming (falsely, according to New York Eater, which judged the Trump Tower Grill’s taco bowls to be “an insult to Mexicans every bit as profound as Trump’s previous pronouncements”) that his people do it better than actual Mexicans. It’s textbook. No wonder California Republican Dennis Hollingsworth tweeted in response: “Holy guacamole, what a dipshit.”

Like Hollingsworth, many interpreted Trump’s tweet as a clueless attempt to reach out to Hispanic-American voters. (Reince Priebus’ generous interpretation was that Trump is “trying”.) But I see something more clever. Trump knows the Hispanic vote is beyond his reach. His actual purpose here is to convince other clueless Anglos that he’s not anti-Hispanic, so they can vote for him without feeling like bigots.

The goal was to get the response he got from Bill O’Reilly (and Neil Cavuto): that the objections to his tweet demonstrate the “political madness” of this campaign. No doubt O’Reilly’s aging white audience is saying, “Look at how crazy those people are! Trump says he loves them, and they’re mad.” Just what the Donald wanted.

and HB2

The plot thickens regarding North Carolina’s HB2 law, the one that polices the state’s bathrooms and prevents local governments from protecting any rights the state doesn’t recognize — particularly gay or trans rights.

Wednesday, the U. S. Justice Department sent Gov. Pat McCrory a letter notifying him that the law violates federal laws against sex-based discrimination in the workplace. The feds wanted assurance by today that North Carolina will not be enforcing the law, which Gov. McCrory is not going to give, calling the letter “Washington overreach”. Billions in federal funds are potentially at risk.

Basically, McCrory is taking the same path that Southern governors like George Wallace and Ross Barnett did during the civil rights era: calling for delay and invoking states rights.

One possible way out is if the city of Charlotte agrees to repeal the LGBT-rights ordinance that HB2 was passed to undo. Then the state might amend HB2 in some way acceptable to the Justice Department. So far, though, Charlotte seems to be taking the view that they didn’t make this problem.

and let’s close with something time-devouring

Polygraph has constructed the most addictive web site I’ve ever linked to. Start at any date you want (after 1958; 1997 is the default), and then watch (and hear) the Billboard Top 5 songs evolve week by week, with a running total of how many weeks each artist stayed at #1. “Maybe I’ll just watch another couple of months,” I say. “Aren’t the Beatles due to show up soon? How long will it take them to catch Elvis?”

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Getting Through

April 25, 2016 – 12:02 pm

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.

— Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy” (1984)

No Sift next week. New articles will appear May 9.

This week’s featured posts are “Beyond Bernie 2016” and “Why You Should Care About Felon Voting Rights“.

This week everybody was talking about the New York primary

The odds of a Clinton/Trump contest in the fall jumped considerably Tuesday, after both had landslide wins in New York. I describe just how completely this slams the door on Bernie’s chances (as well as the options on what to do next) in “Beyond Bernie 2016“.

Trump’s win was in some ways even more crushing, because Ted Cruz got no delegates at all from New York. Cruz is now in the same position as Kasich (or Paul Ryan, for that matter): His only path to the nomination involves stopping Trump from getting a first-ballot majority at the convention, then convincing other candidates’ delegates to switch to him on subsequent ballots. The last time a major party had a convention with more than one ballot was in a different political era entirely, when Adlai Stevenson won the 1952 Democratic nomination on the third ballot.

and Prince

If you weren’t music-conscious in the mid-80s, and haven’t had a friend introduce you to Prince’s music since, you’re probably puzzled by the overwhelming public response to his death (at age 57, two years younger than I am). He’s getting tributes not just from the music and pop-culture parts of the media, but from folks like Rachel Maddow and Josh Marshall.

Here’s what I think was unique about Prince: Other musicians typically envy pop hit-makers for their success, but not for their musical skills. Prince was the exception. He could play almost any rock instrument at a high level — check out the guitar solo that begins at the 3:30 mark here — and he had mastered the entire process that starts with a thought in somebody’s head and ends with music coming out of somebody else’s headphones. He didn’t just perform his songs, he wrote and arranged them, was his own studio band, and sometimes the mixer, engineer, and producer as well. He was famous for blatantly sexy songs, but he also could fit in with the Muppets.

And he was successful at all that. Wikipedia says: “At one point in 1984, Prince simultaneously had the No. 1 album, single, and film in the US; it was the first time a singer had achieved this feat.”

Prince also kept his local identity, and created a music industry in Minneapolis rather than move to an existing music capital like LA. The performances in his movie Purple Rain were filmed at Minneapolis’ First Avenue Club.

That’s why it’s so dismal to hear that he has died at a comparatively early age. But if the elevator tries to bring us down, at least we know what to do.

and you might also be interested in

There’s still another week of Confederate Heritage Month to celebrate over at Orcinus.

Whether or not our war against ISIS succeeds is not entirely up to us. It also depends on Iraq maintaining a stable government, which might be a challenge.

In Alabama, separation of church and state means that your daycare center can go virtually unregulated, if you claim it has a religious purpose. The Center for Investigative Reporting has been doing a series called “The God Loophole” about the problems that leads to.

The tenured Wheaton College professor who got in trouble for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God has reached an agreement to leave the school.

Now that Trump has opened the floodgates, we can expect to see Hispanic stereotypes in lower-office campaigns. Like this ad from a Kentucky Republican running for Congress.

You can tell you’re getting old when more and more news stories make you say, “I thought he was dead.” Well, it turns out Pat Boone is still alive, and calling for FCC regulations against blasphemy. What set him off was a Saturday Night Live skit, which is a fake movie trailer for a fake movie called God is a Boob Man, in which a Christian baker is pressured by the legal system to say that God is gay.

To appreciate it, you need to know what it’s satirizing. In 2014, a film God’s Not Dead was made for all those Christians who imagine that they’re persecuted. In it, a university philosophy professor “demands his students sign a declaration that ‘God is dead’ to pass.” One student resists, is vindicated, and the professor ultimately converts just before dying. Totally realistic, in other words.

That was successful enough that it’s getting a sequel, God’s Not Dead 2. (Who knows, maybe this is the beginning of a genre similar to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, but for Christians. I’m visualizing Shaft with a Bible.) Here is its trailer, which you need to understand is not an SNL parody, no matter how much it sounds like one.

Parodying such nonsense is the blasphemy that Boone thinks TV stations should lose their licenses for broadcasting.

and let’s close with some reading suggestions

A few years ago, NPR polled its readers to find the 100 best fantasy and science fiction novels. But lists like that are a bit unwieldy: Where do you start? So the fanzine SF Signal created an interactive guide to help you figure out which one to read next. And that turned into this flow chart. Click to expand.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

The Rhyme of the Ancient Democrat

April 18, 2016 – 11:35 am

All is in flux, nothing is stationary. … You could not step into the same river twice.

— Heraclitus, 5th century B.C.

What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There is no new thing under the sun. 

— Ecclesiastes 1:9

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

— attributed (probably falsely) to Mark Twain

This week’s featured post, “Do We Still Have to Worry About the McGovern Problem?” considers what lessons (if any) the landslide losses of 1972, 1984, and 1988 have for the Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2016.

This week everybody was talking about taxes

Or at least worrying about them. Today is the deadline for filing 2015’s federal income tax forms. If you’re missing it, don’t kick yourself, just get it done. You might have to pay a penalty, but you won’t go to jail.

Every year, Tax Day sets everyone wondering if there isn’t some better way to do this. It’s not just the money that gets siphoned off into the tax-prep industry, it’s all the time and stress that goes into the process. Sales tax just happens without you needing to fret about it. Property tax is a bill you pay — costly, maybe, but pretty straightforward. Income tax is an ordeal.

For Republicans like Steve Forbes, the resentment Tax Day raises is a chance to push a flat tax, which would be a gold mine for very rich people like Steve Forbes, but wouldn’t make taxes simpler for ordinary folks. (Flattening the tax just changes the numbers in the tax table. Every change that actually would simplify your taxes could be done without flattening the tax rates.)

But Elizabeth Warren has a plan that would make a real difference.

On Wednesday, she introduced a bill that would let people with simple taxes file for free without filling out a return — essentially, the IRS would do people’s taxes for them. Bernie Sanders is a co-sponsor; his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, said she supports the bill, too.

For a very large number of people, the 1040 just collects a lot of information the IRS already knows: It gets the same 1099 and W-2 reports that you do, and you told them last year how many dependents you have. It could run all that through its computers and send you a return. You could OK it and be done, or, if you wanted to take advantage of some deduction they don’t know about, you could submit an amendment.

Why isn’t this a no-brainer for Congress? Three reasons:

  • If you really want the pro-plutocracy flat tax, you want to hold genuine tax simplification hostage. Make people believe that a flat tax is the only answer to their pain.
  • The people who would benefit most from Warren’s plan are ordinary Americans who have no lobbyists.
  • The tax-planning and accounting industries are solidly against this kind of reform, and they do have lobbyists.

Tax Day is also a good time to review how money flows through the federal government. One factor that significantly dumbs down political discourse in the United States is that so few people have a clear idea how the government raises money or what it spends money on. (It’s amazing how many people think we could slash government spending by cutting foreign aid and defunding the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Here’s where the money came from in FY 2015, which ended last October.

Individual income is the tax you’re paying now. Payroll taxes are mainly Social Security and Medicare taxes.

And here’s where it went:

The difference between the two — around $450 billion, or 12% of total spending — was the deficit. Healthcare, Social Security, Defense, and interest on the national debt are pretty obvious, and among them account for 71% of spending. Other Mandatory is stuff like Food Stamps and unemployment compensation.

Non-Defense Discretionary is everything people ordinarily think about when they talk about cutting government spending. It’s only 16%, and includes everything from keeping the National Parks open to NASA to disaster relief.

but I was thinking about a bookstore in Asheville

An op-ed in Thursday’s NYT reminded me what a blunt instrument a boycott is. The owner of Malaprop’s Bookstore asked: “Why Should My Store Be Boycotted Over a Law That I Despise?” Malaprop’s has had to cancel author events, and out-of-state customers have been avoiding Asheville while North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law HB 2 remains in effect.

This made me stop and think, because Asheville is a place I like to visit. I have a red coffee mug with the Malaprop’s logo on one side and “Eat. Sleep. Read.” on the other. Last December, a chunk of “Small-Government Freedom vs. Big-Government Rights” was written while sitting in Malaprop’s cafe section, drinking a Fire Distinguisher (a chili, cayenne, and cinnamon mocha), and using their wifi. (Yeah, I was in the South when I wrote that.)

Asheville as a whole is an unfortunate target, since it’s the cool, intellectual, artsy part of North Carolina. It’s Thomas Wolfe‘s “Altamont”, the home he couldn’t go back to after writing Look Homeward, Angel. And Asheville isn’t happy about the new law. The Asheville City Council has called for HB 2’s repeal. A parody news story says “Entire Fucking City of Asheville Moving Out of North Carolina“.

So yes, it’s a shame Asheville is catching flak for the bigots’ law. And yet … that’s kind of the point. Would the Asheville City Council have taken such a strong position on HB 2 without a boycott?

A law like HB 2 passes because a lot of the people who ought to know better believe that it isn’t really their problem. The boycott is the rest of us saying, “No, it is your problem.” I hope that all over the state, Carolinians who otherwise don’t prioritize LGBT rights, and who shrug and say “What can you do?” whenever the Christian Taliban pushes something through their legislature, are now saying: “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

I’m sorry the boycott is hurting such a cute and pleasant independent bookstore, but HB 2 is hurting a lot of innocent people. And while North Carolina figures out how to fix this, I’ll be looking forward to the next time I can sit in Malaprop’s with a stack of new books on the table, drink some ridiculous coffee concoction, and write a blog post. But don’t look for me there anytime soon.

The most amusing part of the boycott happened last Monday when the porn site xHamster announced it was blocking access to computers with North Carolina IP addresses. This could be more effective than you might think. Studies suggest that Bible Belt states consume more online porn than more liberal, less religious states. It’s that whole repression/rebellion cycle.

and the intersection of religion, law, and absurdity

According to a federal judge, Pastafarianism, the worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

is not a ‘religion’ within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education.

I more or less agree in this particular case, in which a prisoner is asking the prison administration to make allowances for his Pastafarian practices. But if I were a judge, I wouldn’t have much confidence that I could in general draw a line that neatly separated “real” religions from ridiculous systems that people are just having fun with. Imagine, say, a group teaching that people require an absurd deity to properly respond to the absurdity of the human condition. The practitioners themselves might not be able to draw a line between the serious and unserious parts of their faith.

Wednesday David Corn recalled the time in 2007 when Ted Cruz, then state solicitor general, defended a Texas law banning the sale of dildos and vibrators. His office submitted a brief to a federal court claiming that Texas had a legitimate interest in discouraging “autonomous sex” and denying any

substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.

In response, Cruz’ Princeton roommate Craig Mazen (who has dogged him before) tweeted:

Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.

To me, masturbation looks like an issue where Cruz — who claims to be “a Christian first, American second” — may not be taking the Bible literally enough. Particularly Ecclesiastes 9:10 which says:

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

And if your hand needs to amplify its might with battery-powered tools, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.

John Kasich is supposed to be the nice, considerate Republican candidate. But in this video, shot in a Jewish bookstore, we see him “goysplaining” various pieces of the Old Testament to Talmud students, who politely refrain from telling him what a jerk he’s being when he asks them if they know about Joseph and Joshua. I was reminded of the time Rand Paul thought he could teach Howard University students about black history.

Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Haslam vetoed a bill to declare the Bible to be the official state book.

If we believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.

That seems simple enough, but supporters of the bill are going to try to override the veto. To me, the vetoed bill is an example of dominance politics, a phrase I picked up from Josh Marshall, who uses it a little differently. This bill isn’t about solving any substantive problem of the citizens of Tennessee. It’s about one group of citizens proving to the others that they are on top and can grind everybody else’s noses in the dirt.

Mississippi now allows firearms in churches. Gov. Bryant signed the “Church Protection Act” Friday. Psalm 46 says, “God is our refuge and strength.” But just in case that isn’t enough, you might want to pack heat.

However, if you have a favorite gun, I’d recommend leave it at home, because the Psalm continues: “He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; He burneth the chariot in the fire.” I don’t know what He would do to a Glock, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty.

and you might also be interested in

All the recent polls that RCP keeps track of have Clinton and Trump up by double digits for tomorrow’s New York primary. According to Nate Silver, Clinton continues to run ahead of her minimum winning pace, while Trump is running behind.

You would never know it from watching the news reports, but there’s been a protest going on all week in front of the Capitol. About 900 Democracy Spring protesters have been arrested, including Lawrence Lessig.

I love this video criticizing Senate Republicans for refusing to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “I only do my job when I feel like it. That’s why I stand with the Senate.”

Paul Ryan is having the same problems that undermined John Boehner’s speakership, and with the same people, the so-called Freedom Caucus. Friday, the House missed its deadline for passing a FY 2017 budget. Because of the deal Boehner passed on his way out the door, this failure doesn’t necessarily put us on track for an across-the-board government shutdown in October. But it bodes ill for the appropriations bills that the committees should start producing in May. If any of them don’t pass by October, the corresponding segments of the government will shut down.

Digby has a fantasy: Sarah Palin on TV at the Republican Convention. Maybe she’ll compare herself to Bill Nye again, or just go off on another incoherent ramble.

David Neiwert’s Orcinus blog is marking Confederate Heritage Month by blowing away all the soft-focus Gone-With-the-Wind myths about the Confederacy. If Mississippi wants us to spend this month remembering the Confederacy, Neiwert wants to make sure we remember it as the horror it really was.

So far he has discussed such topics as lynching, slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War, just how brutal Confederate slavery was, how a slavery-defending war got sold to whites too poor to own slaves, the Andersonville POW camp, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre of black soldiers trying to surrender, the KKK, and who the carpetbaggers really were.

Speaking of Forrest, who in addition to being a war criminal was also the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, the effort to remove his bust from the Tennessee State Capitol has turned into a general law defining a memorial-removal process, which looks like it could tie the whole thing up for a long time. Meanwhile, the bust remains on display.

and let’s close with a pop culture mash-up

Whitney Avalon has a whole series of Princess Rap Battles on YouTube. My favorite so far: Malificent vs. Daenerys.

By weeklysift | Comments (10)

Justice Delayed

April 11, 2016 – 12:36 pm

The delay of justice is great injustice.

— John Musgrave (1646)

One of this week’s featured posts is another installment in what I’m coming to think of as my countdown-to-Augustus series “The Broken Senate is Breaking the Courts“. The other is my assessment of the Democrats’ chances of taking control of the Senate (and how you can help) in “What Can You Do about the Senate?“

This week everybody was talking about bigotry

Mississippi became the latest state to decide that anti-gay and anti-transgender discrimination needs and deserves the protection of state law. The Mississippi bill is HB1523, the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act”, which is short enough to read in its entirety if you’re interested. To me the striking part of the law is Section 2:

The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:

(a)  Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;

(b)  Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and

(c)  Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.

In other words, HB1523 gives people special rights if their opinion falls on one side of a controversial issue, but not the other. (And why aren’t more people paying attention to (2b)? If you are a cohabitating heterosexual couple, somebody who sincerely believes you are “living in sin” can discriminate against you.) I can’t imagine that this will pass constitutional muster. If the government can’t legally penalize you for the content of your religious beliefs, then it can’t reward you for them either.

That specificity is necessary, though, in order to avoid the other horn of the legalized-discrimination dilemma: A general law protecting people whose religious beliefs justify discrimination would also protect racists. Plenty of religions have at one time or another taught that God created the races and intended them to remain separate. (I researched this last year in “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to Be a Bigot“.) So if your religious beliefs entitle you to discriminate against gays, why not against blacks?

If you’re confused by the law’s name, “government discrimination” refers to government enforcing non-discrimination; it’s a little Orwellian that way. In other words, if your religious beliefs make you want to refuse service to lesbians, and the government says you can’t do that, then the government is discriminating against you.

You know the drill: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Yada, yada, yada.

If you’d rather just make fun of Mississippi’s effort to one-up North Carolina in the most-bigoted-state competition, Funny or Die has that covered.

and presidential politics

For the Democrats, same story as the last few weeks: Yes, Bernie is gaining ground on Hillary. No, he isn’t gaining nearly fast enough to get nominated.

I’m resisting writing about the details of the various disputes between the campaigns, because I doubt I’m getting a balanced view of them. My FaceBook feed and email lists all lean to the left, so I’m exposed to a lot more Bernie stuff than Hillary stuff. These last few weeks the conversation in general has gotten increasingly partisan and irrational, with unfair and downright petty charges going both ways. But because of where I sit, I hear a lot more Bernie irrationality than Hillary irrationality. (I’d give examples, but that just starts me down the rabbit hole.) If I start trying to correct it all, this is going to start sounding like a Hillary blog, which is not my intention.

In general, I’ve been defending Hillary against what I see as basically Republican attacks, like my occasional comments on the email pseudo-scandal. So far, Republicans haven’t been saying much about Bernie, so a comparable defense hasn’t been necessary.

On the Republican side, things are really starting to get interesting, in the horror-movie sense of interesting.

For a long time, pundits had been speculating that Donald Trump’s support had a ceiling, and that when the race came down to two or three candidates, he’d be in trouble. Well, that ceiling turned out to be considerably higher than most of us thought, but he finally seems to be bumping against it.

Nate Silver does what he does best: defines a stat that captures a vague notion we’ve all had. (This is where you see Nate’s background as a baseball stats guy. Baseball is full of vague notions — like clutch hitting, the value of a slick-fielding shortstop, or what it takes to get into the Hall of Fame — that you can’t talk about intelligently until you define some new stats.) The stat is Minimum Winning Vote Share: If all the other candidates got the exact number of votes they actually got, what percentage of the vote would your candidate have needed in order to win by one vote?

MWVS trends inexorably upward as the number of candidates shrinks. Trump’s MWVS in New Hampshire was only 19.5%. (His actual vote share was 35.2%, so he crushed the opposition.) But in 4 of the last 5 contests his MWVS has been over 40%. Trump’s 35.1% of the vote in Wisconsin is almost identical to his percentage in New Hampshire, but it earned him a decisive loss rather than a landslide win, because his MWVS had increased.

Nate then produces two charts: The increase in Trump’s MWVS as the primaries go on, and the increase in his vote percentage. Both trend upward, but MWVS is increasing much faster and looks like it has finally caught up.

In addition to having a ceiling somewhere south of 50% of Republicans, Trump’s nomination is also being called into doubt by how the inner workings of the Republican process are playing out. Getting from polls and primary votes to convention delegates turns out to be a much darker art than most of us realized, and Ted Cruz seems to be a lot better at it.

Trump has already started saying “The system is rigged.” And his supporters already feel cheated by government, by immigrants, by big business, by liberals, and so on. If Trump’s campaign ends up looking (to them) like a microcosm of the whole rigged country, the Republican Convention in Cleveland should be the most interesting convention since the Democrats were in Chicago in 1968. Again, that’s in the horror-movie sense of interesting.

and you might also be interested in

We found out how Trump plans to make Mexico pay for his wall.

The Republican presidential candidate’s campaign said in a memo that if elected in November, Trump would use a U.S. anti-terrorism law to cut off [remittances from immigrants] unless Mexico made a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion for the wall.

The memo says the Mexican economy

receives approximately $24 billion a year in remittances from Mexican nationals working in the United States. The majority of that amount comes from illegal aliens.

Threatening to shut that off, Trump thinks, will bring Mexico to its knees. Vox takes a more nuanced look at the topic.

A few points: First, people should be very wary of the government finding creative uses for anti-terrorism powers. These laws were meant to keep international banks from laundering money for Al Qaeda. Using them to keep Jesus the Janitor from sending $20 a week to his grandma goes way beyond Congress’ intent.

Second, it demonstrates a pattern of thought that I’ve pointed out before: when you imagine taking decisive action against somebody and then ignore whatever they might do in response. That thinking often leads to conflicts where your opponent’s responses are actually much cheaper and simpler than yours, and so you will lose even if you are stronger and richer.

Trump’s whole wall is that way. A 30-foot wall can be defeated by a 31-foot ladder and a rope. Making the wall a foot higher is very expensive. Making a longer ladder and rope, not so much.

Similarly, maybe you can prevent Jesus from making a wire transfer or using some other 21st-century process. But are you going to open every Mexico-bound letter to find all the cash or debit cards?  What about friendly American citizens who will carry unsuspicious quantities of cash across the border for Jesus?

That leads to the security downside of lumping Jesus’ grandma in with Al Qaeda: Ordinary Americans might cooperate with a money-smuggling network if they thought they were benefitting Mexican grandmas. And once that network is up, maybe Al Qaeda will use it.

Ezra Klein’s “Is the media biased against Bernie Sanders?” reflects a lot of my own views of political coverage (which I expressed in a 2011 article “Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation“, and which leans heavily on Jay Rosen’s “Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press“). Klein’s answer to his own question is: It’s not that simple.

I believe that mainstream media contains very little conscious propaganda. Reporters at CNN or the NYT aren’t thinking “I want (or don’t want) Bernie Sanders to win, so I’m going to say this.” Instead, reporters (both individually and as a group) develop an unstated — and to a certain extent even unconscious — model of who these candidates are and what the larger narrative of the campaign is. That model influences which events get classified as news and how that news gets presented.

If you want to get technical, it’s not about bias so much as prejudice. Reporters aren’t pushing for or against a certain candidate, but they have made prior judgments that may cut either way, depending on the circumstances.

The judgment they’ve made about Sanders is that he’s authentic, but he’s a big-picture guy who doesn’t sweat the details. Clinton they see as calculating and occasionally slippery. That level of generalization doesn’t appear explicitly in news stories, but it influences coverage: If Hillary says something different from one day to the next, it gets covered as a tactical maneuver. If Bernie does the same thing, it’s because he hasn’t thought things through that well. Either candidate might regard that coverage as negative bias.

Rosen sees this as an inherent problem in the journalistic ideal of objectivity. By pretending to speak with an idealized objectivity that is more or less impossible for humans to achieve, subjective judgments are driven underground, where they arguably do more damage and are harder to correct. Klein puts it this way:

the model is, for the most part, hidden, and the accumulated inputs to the model are hard to explain or may not have been things an individual journalist was allowed to report on. The result is that coverage can feel confusing and biased, because the real rationale for the decisions being made about what to cover and how to cover it is obscured from the audience.

Klein’s article is unusual because of how introspective he is about his prior judgments on the candidates. So it is less “objective” than most campaign coverage, but probably communicates more insight.

In a nerdy but interesting 538 article, Ben Casselman explains how quadratic voting might improve the five-choice (strongly approve to strongly disapprove) polling scale.

WonkBlog’s Emily Badger points out how easy it is to come up with some “solution” for poor people’s problems that covertly assumes they have the same resources the rest of us take for granted. The example is simple: reusable cloth diapers. Yes, they can be cheaper than disposables, if you have the upfront money to buy them and a washing machine.

and let’s close with a gadget

It’s like the kids who grew up watching Transformers are old enough now to design real things.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Paying Hell

April 4, 2016 – 11:36 am

Your vote is supposed to count. Break that understanding and there will be hell to pay.

— Josh Marshall

This week’s featured posts are “Crime and Punishment: Did Trump Spill the Beans on the Pro-Life Movement?” and “Where North Carolina’s New Law is Going“.

This week everybody was talking about the culture wars

The two featured posts cover the two main stories: whether banning abortion means punishing women who seek abortions, and North Carolina’s bathroom-regulating HB2 law that simultaneously prevents any local government from protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination.

What I didn’t mention in those posts was the economic backlash against North Carolina.

The transgender bathroom scare may not be as effective as some people believe.

and the presidential race

Tomorrow is the Wisconsin primary. Cruz is expected to win on the Republican side, and that injects more doubt into the race.

Josh Marshall makes an interesting point about the possibility that Trump may go to the convention with far more primary votes than anyone else, but not come out of it with the nomination.

Through 1968 — in my living memory in other words — nobody really expected their primary vote to decide the nominee of their party. Conventions had their smoke-filled rooms, where party bosses like Chicago’s Mayor Daley anointed a winner. That’s how it had always been done.

But since 1972 we’ve had a different system, where the people who vote in primaries think they’re actually choosing the nominee.

what most people never really thought through was that the clinch before the convention model was always based on fundamental party unity. A candidate didn’t win by winning. He or she won when they demonstrated that no other rival could win. After that, the money dried up for the also rans and they were ushered out of the race. This just wasn’t obvious before because we’d never seen this system operate under these different conditions.

But right now the Republican Party is fundamentally divided, and so the arcane rules of delegate selection are really starting to matter. In many states, delegates “won” by Trump in the primary are being named by the party establishment. Many of them are obligated to vote for Trump on the first ballot, but aren’t actual Trump supporters. If Trump can be stopped on the first ballot, his nomination prospects may be over. What happens then?

Over half a century, the national primary process has been enshrined as a national election process. It may be run by party rules and may have all sorts of obscure and nonsensical bylaws. But you vote in the same precinct station as you vote in real elections. For real people that means it’s an election, period. You vote and your vote is supposed to count. Break that understanding and there will be hell to pay. Whatever rules you can cite simply are not going to matter that much.

On the Democratic side, polls make Sanders a slight favorite to win in Wisconsin. If he does, the question will be whether he won by enough, given how far behind he is in the national delegate totals. Nate Silver has made a projection of how many delegates Sanders needs from each remaining contest if he’s going to win a majority of pledged delegates (leaving the superdelegates out of it). In that model, Sanders needs 50 of Wisconsin’s 86 delegates, and would probably have to win the popular vote by 16 points to get them.

Why does this keep happening? The Washington Post took the bait from a Republican congressperson who claimed to know, and reported that 147 FBI agents were working on the Clinton email case. That number echoed all over the media, creating the impression that as Chris Cillizza put it, “this investigation was far more wide-ranging than I, at least, believed”

As usual, the report turned out to be bogus. The WaPo had to back off, saying that no more than 50 agents were involved. NBC later was able to lower that number to 12.

But for some reason this game never gets old: A Republican congressman (or someone on his staff) feeds the media some scandalous “fact” about Clinton, which then gets reported as if it had some news value. When the story turns out to be false, the liar’s identity is protected.

This week the Sanders and Clinton campaigns threw charges and counter-charges about campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. MaddowBlog’s Steve Benen and the WaPo’s fact-checkers try to sort it all out.

and you might also be interested in

If black history gets its own month, why not Confederate history? In Mississippi, it does: April is Confederate Heritage Month.

On his Orcinus blog, Dave Neiwert has decided to take that seriously, using this month to make sure we don’t forget noteworthy aspects of our Confederate heritage, like lynching. Or the fact that the Civil War wasn’t about “states rights”, as neo-Confederates claim. The Confederacy was created to defend slavery, pure and simple.

The Apple/FBI controversy ends with a whimper rather than a bang: Never mind, Apple, we can do it without you.

If you’re wondering what people are thinking, when they support the Senate refusing to consider a Supreme Court nominee for the first time ever, it’s something like this: Obama’s nominee is going to do his bidding, with the result that “at least four million illegal immigrants would be rewarded with jobs, welfare, and other taxpayer-paid benefits”.

In other words, they’re looking at the Supreme Court not as a court of law, but as a super-Senate that votes for or against certain results.

A sign that we need a higher minimum wage, at the very least:

2014 was the first year that Pew studied in which median spending on [housing, food, and transportation] was higher than the median income for those in the lower third of income groups.

Increased housing costs were the immediate cause of the change.

Tough decision: Should I watch an Opening Day baseball game on TV this afternoon, or scrape the snow off my car?

and let’s close with a math experiment you can do at home

There was a time this guy might have been hung as a witch. Watch the “miraculous” thing he can do with a metal plate, a violin bow, and a can of couscous.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

Common Mistakes

March 28, 2016 – 11:36 am

In going to war, it is a common mistake to begin at the wrong end: to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.

— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 5th century B.C.

This week’s featured post is “Buying Back American Democracy“. And if yesterday’s church service left you feeling uninspired or maybe even a little alienated, check out the “Struggling With Easter” service I led three years ago.

Last week’s featured post “Tick, Tick, Tick … the Augustus Countdown Continues” turned out to be way more popular than I expected, with more than 8000 hits in its first week.

This week everybody was talking about terrorism

As you undoubtedly know, Tuesday morning three bombs went off in Brussels, two at the airport and one at a train station, killing 34 (including three suicide bombers) and injuring 300. The perpetrators had ISIS training, and some were connected with the Paris attacks in November.

Whenever something like this happens, I try to remind people of the points I covered in “Terrorist Strategy 101: a review“. What makes a terrorist attack different from all other kinds of warfare is that its targets have no military significance. In this case, for example, the attackers did not go after NATO headquarters (which is also in Brussels), or a Belgian air base. If they killed or injured any military personnel, it was by coincidence.

A terrorist attack is similar to a bank shot in pool. The attack itself accomplishes little that is useful to the attacking side, so its whole purpose is the bounce it leads to: the response from the side attacked. That’s why, if some response immediately leaps to mind, you always have to ask yourself: “Is this exactly what they want me to do?”

The pool of potential ISIS recruits consists of Muslims who feel that a world community dominated by the West has no place for them, and leaves them nothing but bad choices: They can be ruled by autocrats more loyal to Western money than to their citizens, like the House of Saud or the generals in Cairo. Or they can live in war zones like Syria or Iraq or Libya or Gaza. Or they can come to the West and join a despised and dishonored underclass.

ISIS’s terrorism aims to goad us into responses that expand their recruiting pool by justifying that view of Islam and the West. If they can get us to heap scorn on Islam in general, to ghettoize and demean immigrant Muslims in Western nations, to commit atrocities against innocent Muslims in the Middle East, or in some other way to make it harder for Muslims anywhere to find a place in our world order, then they’ve succeeded.

President Obama understands this, which is why he always seems so unresponsive after an attack. He generally says something equivalent to: We have a long-term strategy, which is to tightly focus our counterattacks on the people who threaten us and our allies. That strategy is going to succeed and so we’re going to stick with it.

Admittedly, that’s really unsatisfying. What anybody with mammalian hormones wants to hear is that we’re going to lay waste to everything that has even the faintest connection to the attackers, until they’re really sorry they riled us up. But that’s a sucker’s response; the whole point of the attack was to trigger it.

By contrast, Ted Cruz went straight for the sucker response:

We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence.

We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.

We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration.

And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS.

The bizarre implication of that second point is that we don’t just have a problem with terrorist individuals, like the couple who carried out the San Bernardino massacre, but that we face a threat from entire Muslim neighborhoods. Even weirder is Cruz’ belief that a heavier police presence in those neighborhoods can prevent “radicalization”, when it obviously would push in precisely the opposite direction: Nothing alienates people faster than being hassled by police because of their race or religion.

Vox connects this radicalized-neighborhood paranoia to the imaginary “no-go zones” in Muslim neighborhoods of European cities, a bit of dystopian nonsense Bobby Jindal invented after the Paris attacks. As so often happens in the conservative echo chamber, delusions don’t get corrected as facts emerge; instead, each delusion becomes a building block for the next one.

Cruz has spelled out his “coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS” before: carpet bomb areas that include large numbers of ISIS fighters, rather than being “politically correct” by trying not to kill innocent civilians. (Words that might substitute for “politically correct” here are humane or not a war criminal.) Killing their innocent wives and children might radicalize a few people too.

Trump similarly took the bait, reiterating his endorsement of torture and “knocking the hell” out of ISIS, whatever that means. The Chicago Tribune‘s Rex Huppke summarized the Cruz/Trump approach:

We see problem. We hit problem with big stick. Problem go away.

and Cuba

Bloody attacks and fist-waving responses are more eye-catching, but in the long run the most important thing that happened this week was probably President Obama’s trip to Cuba. He was the first American president to visit since President Coolidge came three decades before the Cuban Revolution.

Obama is doing what he can to normalize relations, but he can’t end the embargo against Cuba without an act of Congress, which he is unlikely to get because Congress is broken. At this point no one can argue that the half-century-long embargo has succeeded in overthrowing the Castro government, or that it will succeed if we stick with it just a little bit longer. It is one of those temporary policies that has continued through the decades precisely because it wasn’t working. If it had worked the way it was supposed to, Castro would have fallen in 1960 or 1962 and we’d have normalized relations with his successor.

This is something to remember when Donald Trump calls for a “temporary” ban on Muslim immigration “until we can figure out what’s going on“. Once something like that gets started, it can continue for half a century or more simply because no event allows us to declare victory and we can’t admit our mistake.

The Cuban embargo was such a mistake. In Cold War Europe, Communist East Germany had to limit travel to West Germany because it couldn’t let its citizens compare the two societies. Similarly, Communist Cuba would have had to prevent its citizens from measuring their lives against their cousins’ in Miami. But the embargo allowed Castro to blame us for the separation.

Everything Obama does is an outrage to conservatives, so this trip was too. Their outrage crystallized around this photo of Obama with a Che Guevara mural in the background.

How dare he! Of course it was fine for President Reagan to speak under a bust of Lenin at Moscow State University.

Or for the first President Bush to be photographed in Tiananmen Square with Mao’s image behind him.

But Obama and Che … that’s completely different!

This continues a pattern that goes back to the earliest days of the Obama presidency: When he does things that many previous presidents have done without incident — put his feet on a desk, take a vacation with his family, send a secular-themed Christmas card — it provokes outrage. It’s almost as if Obama himself were different, in some indefinable way, from all previous presidents. (I cataloged a bunch of examples of Obama-specific outrage two years ago in “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?“.)

and the 2016 campaigns

The Sanders campaign has been saying for weeks that things would get better for them when the campaign got to the West, and they were right. Clinton may have won the Arizona primary, but Sanders put up huge margins in the caucuses in Utah, Idaho, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.

As a result, Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates shrank from 327 last week to 230. The amount that Clinton is running ahead of her minimum winning pace (according to Nate Silver’s model) fell from 112 to 92.

Unfortunately for Sanders, that nearly finishes the caucuses. (Participating in a caucus requires more time and effort than voting in a primary, which favors the candidate generating more enthusiasm.) Wyoming and North Dakota are the only state caucuses left. Worse, most of the remaining primaries are closed (i.e., restricted to registered Democrats), which favors Clinton. The big states still to come — New York, Pennsylvania, California — have large minority populations, which also favors Clinton.

The next contest is an open primary a week from tomorrow in Wisconsin. The limited recent polling indicates a small edge for Clinton. Two weeks later comes a closed primary in New York, where Clinton was a senator and recent polls have her up by around 30%. As I said last week, Clinton could still self-destruct in some way, but unless she does, it’s over.

If you thought the Republican race couldn’t go lower after the nationally televised discussion of Trump’s penis a few weeks ago, you were wrong. And it just keeps getting worse.

One point I’ll make about the smear-the-other-guy’s-wife exchange: Neither Melania Trump or Heidi Cruz has faced anything like the vitriol that has been unleashed on Michelle Obama these last eight years. Michelle has been a First Lady we should all be able to take pride in, but apparently she looks like a gorilla if you put your racist glasses on.

Thursday evening I was at a Massachusetts house party for Illinois Rep. Bill Foster, the only physicist in Congress. (If you’re a science type and aren’t excited by your local House race, check him out. He’s been winning close elections in a traditionally Republican district and needs your help.) Barney Frank spoke. Barney is expecting a 1964-scale landslide this fall, with Trump playing the Goldwater role.

Jamelle Bouie debunks “the myth of the Trump Democrat”. Trump’s favorable/unfavorable ratings among Democrats are roughly the same as Ted Cruz’, or about where Mitt Romney was four years ago. Likewise, among working-class white Obama voters, Trump and Cruz are about equally popular. In short, Trump’s working-class white support mainly comes from people who stopped voting for Democrats a long time ago.

Josh Marshall and Nate Silver make a similar point with different data: In those blue states where Trump’s appeal to working-class whites is supposed to turn things around, there’s no sign of that happening. Trump trails Clinton by wide margins in rust-belt states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. When he has won primaries in blue states like Massachusetts, he’s been doing it with a fairly small number of voters, due to a relatively small Republican electorate split among many candidates.

Summing up: It’s way too early to say that Trump can’t win in the fall, but the scenarios Democrats worry about aren’t showing up in the numbers yet.

and bigotry

Apparently the biggest emergency in North Carolina is something about bathrooms. Wednesday, the NC legislature was called back for a special session to deal with the horrifying prospect of Charlotte protecting LGBT rights. In a single day (which allowed 30 whole minutes for public comment), Republicans managed to introduce, hold hearings on, pass through both houses, and sign into law a bill that:

overturns Charlotte’s ban [on LGBT discrimination]: It also prevents any local governments from passing their own non-discrimination ordinances, mandates that students in the state’s schools use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, and prevents cities from enacting minimum wages higher than the state’s.

So can we finally dispose of the myth that Republicans and conservatives favor local control over Big Government? If a city or town in North Carolina wants to protect LGBT rights or insist on workers being paid a living wage, the bigger government in Raleigh says they can’t. And if the consensus opinion at some state college is that they can deal with gender ambiguity in their bathrooms, well, forget about it; the bureaucrats have spoken. Conservative political correctness says that men are men and women are women, so that’s that. (BTW: What if there’s a typo on your birth certificate?)

In another context, I ran into a phrase this week that applies here: dominance politics. There is no actual problem here that needs solving, and certainly nothing that couldn’t wait for the legislature’s next regular session. The point of the bill, which is emphasized by the elimination of all normal procedure in its passage, is for Christian culture warriors to express their dominance.

Naturally, a backlash is brewing, as national and multinational businesses that have LGBT employees resist sending them to work in a state where they have been declared to be second-class citizens, with no rights which the majority is bound to respect.

and you might also be interested in

This week’s guns-make-us-safer story isn’t about somebody shooting somebody by mistake, it’s evidence that nobody really believes the NRA’s propaganda. As in 2012, the 2016 Republican Convention will ban guns. I mean, if a good guy with a gun is the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun, what could be safer than to crowd thousands and thousands of good guys with guns into an arena? As Colorado State Rep. Carol Murray put it:

when you have a gun-free zone, it’s like saying, ‘Come and get me.’

I shudder to think of all those unarmed Republicans huddled together with nothing but professional law enforcement to protect them, waiting helplessly for someone to come and get them. It’s just too horrible.

If you listen to Trump or Cruz speeches, you’ll frequently hear the prediction that Hillary Clinton will soon be indicted for her emails, or, if not, it will only be because the Obama Justice Department is blocking such an indictment.

One typical version of this Republican fantasy was in the March 20 New York Post. According to anonymous “associates in the private sector” who claim to have contact with unnamed FBI agents, who supposedly know the mind of FBI director Jim Comey (whether by talking to him directly or by hearing talk filtered through several other intermediaries), Comey “is getting stonewalled, despite uncovering compelling evidence that Clinton broke the law.”

The article is a near-perfect conspiracy theory: Since even its third-hand sources are anonymous, and neither the “compelling evidence” nor the laws allegedly broken are specified, nothing in the story can be checked against reality. And it makes no predictions that could be checked in the future: If nothing happens, that’s because Obama’s stonewalling succeeded.

A much more compelling analysis comes from Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the security manual for the Department of Homeland Security, who explains why Clinton won’t and shouldn’t be indicted: Whenever you identify a specific law that Clinton might have broken, and then check the known facts against the provisions of that law, there’s no crime.

The staff of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is cleaning up and getting ready to reopen in a few weeks. Estimates of the costs to taxpayers stemming from the Bundy occupation are at $5.7 million and rising, not to mention the loss of time and data in environmental research projects, and the unquantifiable damage to archeological sites. This week, local media got its first look at how trashed the place was.

and let’s close with an intervention

Ireland gives America the girl-to-girl talk we really need. “Don’t give away your nuclear codes to the first megalomaniac that flashes his cash at you. You’re worth more than that, America. Have some self respect.”

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Very Bad Things

March 21, 2016 – 11:04 am

Riots aren’t necessarily a bad thing.

— Scottie Nell Hughes,
a Tea Party activist who has campaigned with Donald Trump

This week’s featured post is “Tick, Tick, Tick … the Augustus Countdown Continues“.

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to fill the seat vacated when Justice Scalia died.  As Chief Judge of the second-most-powerful court in the country, Garland is arguably the most important judge not already on the Supreme Court. If you’re just looking at pure legal qualifications, this is the most qualified person Obama could have picked.

So this much is clear: President Obama did his job and played it straight, offering the Senate someone they have no reason to treat as if he had cooties. If there’s some weird political gamesmanship going on, it comes the other side.

Many progressives are disappointed, wishing Obama had made a bolder, more liberal choice — not to mention a younger nominee who might expect to be around for several decades, rather than a 63-year-old. (Another name often mentioned is Sri Srinivasan, who is 49.) But at a time when the Senate is controlled by the opposite party, I think it’s appropriate to trim in their direction just a bit, making agreement easier and obstruction harder.

I’m feeling a little smug about the advice I gave right after Justice Scalia’s death:

If I were Obama, I would take McConnell’s obstruction threat seriously, and appoint whoever I thought would work best in a why-don’t-they-do-their-jobs attack ad. I’d be looking for a Mr. Rogers type: Somebody who exudes a sense of basic decency, who wouldn’t ring any alarm bells about affirmative action or political correctness.

That’s pretty much what he did.

and primary results

Democrats. Sanders’ hope for winning the nomination depended on keeping Clinton’s victories isolated in the South, with her Massachusetts win looking like a fluke. Yes, she had a big delegate lead, but that was because the Southern primaries all came early in the process; everything would change when the big rust belt states started voting.

His surprise win in Michigan seemed portentous, even if didn’t do much to close the gap. (Because the vote was so close, Sanders only got 4 more delegates out of Michigan than Clinton did.) What if he gained momentum and swept the other Midwestern industrial states by larger margins?

Well, now we know that isn’t going to happen. Tuesday, Clinton finished her Southern sweep by decisively winning Florida and North Carolina. But more importantly, she also won big in Ohio, narrowly in Illinois, by an infinitesimal margin in Missouri. Sanders did not win anywhere. So now it’s Michigan that looks like the fluke.

I know a lot of you aren’t going to want to hear this, but it’s over; Clinton will be nominated. There are no winner-take-all states on the Democratic calendar that would allow Sanders to catch up in big chunks, and that’s what he needs to do.

Nate Silver sums up:

It’s not that it’s mathematically impossible for Sanders to win; Clinton could have some sort of epic meltdown. But she controls her own fate while Sanders doesn’t really control his, and she has quite a lot of tolerance for error.

The Sanders campaign argues that the calendar has turned in their favor; now that the South is out of the way, the remaining primaries are better for them. And that’s true, but not on the scale they need. Here the significant number isn’t Clinton’s 327-delegate lead in the raw count, but that she’s 112 delegates ahead of the pace Silver’s model says she needs if she’s going to win, taking state characteristics into account. (If the delegate count were currently 1050-968 in Clinton’s favor, Silver would regard the race as essentially even, given that Sanders’ worst states are behind him. But she actually leads 1162-835.)

For example, suppose Sanders were to win 41 of Arizona’s 75 delegates tomorrow. (The most recent poll shows Clinton well ahead, but it’s not very reliable.) That would lower Clinton’s raw lead by 7, but since Silver’s model tagged Arizona as Sanders-favorable going in and set 34 as Clinton’s delegate target, she would remain 112 delegates ahead of her projected winning pace.

Republicans. Donald Trump also had a good day Tuesday, but his prospects are murkier. He leads Cruz and Kasich in delegates 695-424-144, but he has less than half of the delegates awarded so far, and Silver’s model has him 24 delegates behind the pace he needs if he’s going to win a majority.

The RCP national polling average has Trump fluctuating between 30-40%, with Cruz and Kasich both rising and the open question of what Rubio’s supporters will do now that he’s out of the race. The only post-Rubio poll has Trump/Cruz/Kasich at 43/28/21. So there’s a real possibility Trump will enter this summer’s Republican Convention with a clear delegate lead, but not the majority necessary to nominate him.

Sanders and Kasich are both being told that if you can’t win you should quit. This seems silly to me: If you have a case to make and the means to make it, I don’t see the problem. If the candidate, donors, and volunteers are willing to accept the risk that they may be wasting their time and money, that’s up to them.

On the other hand, if your last chance is to run a harshly negative campaign against your party’s front-runner, that raises a different question: Is your slim hope of victory so important that it’s worth sabotaging your party in the more likely case that you don’t get nominated? But that’s more a question of tactics than of continuing or quitting. So far, neither Sanders nor Kasich has been that negative.

One message coming from the Sanders camp is starting to annoy me: They never say it in so many words, but they often imply that their supporters should count more than Clinton’s supporters.

For example, when they start enthusing about Sanders’ support among young voters, even in primaries that he lost, I find myself thinking: “Yeah, but each under-30 voter only gets one vote, and older voters get one vote too.”

I hear something similar in the more recent argument that if Sanders wins a bunch of late primaries, the superdelegates should respect his momentum and give him the nomination, even if Clinton has won more non-super delegates (subdelegates?) and gotten more total votes. Sanders strategist Tad Devine even suggests pledged delegates should break faith with the voters who elected them if Sanders wins late primaries: “When a frontrunner assumes the lead, that frontrunner needs to win to the end.”

Again: Everyone agrees that the early primaries favored Clinton and the late ones favor Sanders. But late-primary voters, like early-primary voters, should just get one vote.

If you’re a Democrat fretting over the higher turnout in Republican primaries this year, 538‘s Harry Enten says you should stop:

Democrats shouldn’t worry. Republicans shouldn’t celebrate. As others have pointed out, voter turnout is an indication of the competitiveness of a primary contest, not of what will happen in the general election. The GOP presidential primary is more competitive than the Democratic race.

He has the historical analysis to back that up. A particularly striking example is 1988, when (like today) a two-term president was headed out the door: The Democratic primary turnout that year was nearly double the Republican, but Bush beat Dukakis decisively in the fall.

and let’s follow up on some previous discussions

Trump as con man. I talked about this two weeks ago in “Peak Drumpf“. The New Yorker consults an expert: Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game. She never makes a definite pronouncement, claiming you’d have to see into Trump’s head to be sure, but the upshot of her article “Donald Trump, Con Artist?” is: Yeah, probably.

Trump-inspired violence. [discussed last week] Of course there were new incidents, since Trump has done nothing to tone things down. As Vox‘ Dara Lind concludes:

Maybe it’s gone so far that even Donald Trump can’t stop it. But no one knows that yet, because Donald Trump hasn’t tried.

In the both-parties-are-the-same version of reality, Bernie Sanders is the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump. But look how each responds to accusations that he promotes his supporters’ aggressive behavior.

Bernie draws a clear line between peaceful protest and disruptive violence.

We have never — not once — urged any supporter of ours to disrupt a meeting, and I think that’s kind of counter-productive. Having a respectful demonstration, a protest, is I think absolutely right. … [but] disrupting rallies is not my style. I would urge people not to do that.

Trump, on the other hand, never completely disowns his followers’ violence, or draws any clear line at all. Sometimes he openly praises violence, saying things like “Maybe [the protester] should have been roughed up.” and “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you?” and “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

When he does distance himself from acts of violence, the message is always mixed. A vague denial that he condones or promotes violence is followed with praise for his violent supporters: They are “very passionate“. They have “spirit“. They “love this country“. (I hear echoes of the way a wifebeater excuses his crimes: He loves this woman so much she just makes him crazy.) Their victims are “bad dudes … big, strong, powerful guys doing damage to people” — damage that for some reason is never caught on video, despite happening in rooms full of Trump supporters with smart phones. (BTW: What racial image is conjured up by the phrase bad dude?)

This week, when Trump predicted riots at the Republican Convention if he isn’t nominated — a scenario that I don’t think was in the public mind until that moment — he did not condemn the possibility or commit himself to trying to stop it, but said only “I wouldn’t lead it.” A prominent Trump supporter (though not quite a spokesman) went farther while talking to Wolf Blitzer:

Riots aren’t necessarily a bad thing … [Not] if it means it’s because [Trump supporters are] fighting the fact that our establishment Republican Party has gone corrupt and decided to ignore the voice of the people and ignore the process.

Huffington Post reporters Daniel Marans and Ryan Grim lay out six steps to brownshirt-like violence. The Chicago protest could mark the beginning of Step 4: The opposition fights back. Trump’s tweet “Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to your [events]!” threatens Step 5: Going on offense. (Though that threat hasn’t materialized yet.) Next comes Step 6: Picking a shirt (or hat) color.

I’ve seen claims that Step 6 is happening too, but so far I’m not convinced: The so-called Lion’s Guard looks more like a small-scale fascist group (I use that word carefully, having read their blog) trying to get publicity than an organic Trump-supporter group with serious membership. From what I’ve seen so far, it could just be one guy with an overactive imagination.

Apple vs. FBI. I talked about this last month. More recently Jonathan Zdziarski writes:

At the end of the day, I sit here and look at the core questions that are on the table. Should the government have carte blanche rights to force anyone to work for them? Should the privacy of people’s entire past be subject to a warrant? Should people be allowed to have private conversations, private thoughts, private ideas – all things stored on people’s iPhones – subject to search by the government? I am honestly in shock, and saddened by the fact that any of these questions could be raised at all in this country.

And Boing Boing quotes Zdziarski’s summary of an Apple legal brief: “If it please the Court, tell the FBI to go fuck themselves.” That’s a “translation” of this:

Apple instead objects to the government’s attempted conscription of it to send individual citizens into a super-secure facility to write code for several weeks on behalf of the government on a mission that is contrary to the values of the company and these individuals.

Privileged Distress. Several people have pointed out the resonance between “When You’re Accustomed To Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression” and my second-most-popular post “The Distress of the Privileged” from 2012. It’s good to see these ideas spreading.

While we’re on the subject, Chicago Theological Seminary claims to give its students “white privilege glasses“.

The Bundys and their allies. [The Bundy-ranch stand-off was discussed in “Rights Are for People Like Us” and “Cliven Bundy and the Klan Komplex“. I covered the Malheur Refuge occupation week-to-week earlier this year.] The government is throwing the book at both father and son.

The Oregon incident drew Cliven Bundy away from his armed camp and into a situation where he could be easily arrested for charges stemming from the 2014 standoff at his ranch: “conspiracy, assault on a law enforcement officer, carrying a firearm in a crime of violence, obstruction of justice, interference with commerce by extortion and aiding and abetting others in breaking the law”. Thursday, his petition to be released from jail pending trial was denied. Judge Carl Hoffman explained:

I do not believe, Mr. Bundy, that you will comply with my court orders any more than you have complied with previous court orders.

Refusing to acknowledge federal authority — which I’m sure ingratiates him to the federal judge — Bundy has declined to enter a plea in the case.

Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer, whose jurisdiction adjoins Harney County, where the Malheur Wildlife Refuge sits, openly sympathized with the occupiers, and is now under investigation by Oregon Justice Department for his role in the 41-day standoff.

The occupation’s leaders were on their way to meet with Palmer when they were arrested (in a confrontation where LaVoy Finnicum was killed). The state police originally planned to make the stop at a more tactically advantageous site in Grant County, but decided to avoid Palmer’s territory and instead set up their roadblock in Harney.

From jail, Ammon Bundy spoke out in Sheriff Palmer’s favor:

Sheriff Palmer went to the source and found out the truth. He found out that we at the refuge stood for the Constitution, [and the protesters] love this country and would not hurt another person.

That deep desire to harm no one must have been what all the guns were for.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has also been calling attention to the links between the Malheur occupiers and Republican politicians via the Coalition of Western States.

Ferguson. When we last talked about this, Ferguson’s city council had balked at full compliance with the deal it had negotiated with the feds, and the Justice Department responded by filing a lawsuit. That seems to have gotten them back into line. The issue going forward is whether Ferguson can survive financially or will have to go bankrupt. But it looks like they won’t be allowed to solve that problem by using their police force and municipal courts to squeeze money out of the poor.

and you might also be interested in

A concise explanation of how the rich have used race to divide the working classes, going all the way back to colonial times.

Vanity Fair imagines how things might have gone if Donald Trump had run as a Democrat. In some ways his appeal to working-class anger would work better there, but there would be a problem:

Democrats still make an effort to base their policies and debates, however imperfectly, on fact. That’s an awkward fit for Trump, who has a habit of making things up.

In case you’ve been hoping Republicans unite around Ted Cruz, think about the list foreign policy advisors he put out:

The first name on the list? Frank “Obama is a Muslim” Gaffney, Bloomberg reports. Gaffney is the Joe McCarthy of Islamophobia. His think tank, the Center for Security Policy, is dedicated to raising awareness about the jihadist infiltration of the American government. For Gaffney, Barack Hussein Obama is but the tip of the iceberg — in truth, the Muslim Brotherhood has placed operatives throughout the federal government. Among their top agents: Clinton adviser Huma Abedin and anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist.

and let’s close with some Rose Garden rap

Many of you have probably seen this already, but it’s worth a second look. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of the Hamilton musical, shows President Obama how to freestyle.

By weeklysift | Comments (12)

De-trolling

March 14, 2016 – 11:24 am

No man is free who is not master of himself.

— Pythagoras

This week’s featured post is “My Racial Blind Spots“, where I try to answer the question that Don Lemon asked Bernie and Hillary.

This week, I’m feeling trolled

If I had to pick a moment when I started on the path that led to current-events blogging and eventually to the Weekly Sift, it would be one beautiful summer day in (as best I can reconstruct it) 2000. I was walking through a lovely stretch of woods, but all I could do was rage about the issues I’d been hearing about on TV: Elián González, the Microsoft antitrust trial, and some other things I can’t even remember now. Then I had one of those view-yourself-from-the-outside experiences, and I thought: “This is nuts. I’m in an idyllic setting and I’m miserable. Why am I letting CNN control my emotions like this?”

I resolved to be more mindful about bringing my own values and my own interests and my own point-of-view to the news, rather than letting somebody else control my attention. I would strive to focus on the issues that I found to be important, rather than the ones that had been chosen for me. And when I did think about the “hot” issues, I would do it as myself, not as an outrage machine programmed by somebody else.

Three years later, I felt good enough about my relationship to the news that I started sharing it by blogging. Eventually that became a weekly thing, and in 2008 I started the Weekly Sift. But that summer walk in the woods has continued to be a touchstone: Am I really bringing my own intelligence to the news, or am I just reacting? Am I absorbing events and processing them, or is stuff just bouncing off of me like another wall in the echo chamber?

Right now, I’m finding this presidential campaign to be a challenge, and I suspect many of you are too. I feel two black holes trying to draw me in: First, the mainstream horse-race coverage of the presidential campaign, where polls and tactics and spin are all that matters, and speculation about who will win eclipses thinking about whether any of these people would be good at this job, or what their administrations would mean for this country and the world.

And second, Donald Trump. Two weeks in a row, my featured post has been about Trump: “Trump is an opportunistic infection” and “Peak Drumpf“. And again this week, what is the obvious thing to write about? The escalating threat of violence at Trump rallies, leading to the cancellation of his rally in Chicago, Secret Service agents rushing the stage to protect him in Dayton, and demonstrators getting pepper-sprayed in Kansas City.

Neither of those black holes should be ignored, because there’s a lot of important stuff to think through: Who wins this election seems really important. And the Trump candidacy represents something different from all the major campaigns of my lifetime, one that it’s not obvious how to respond to.

But at the same time, I keep noticing that my affect is all wrong: I don’t want to think, I want to react. I want to get whipped up and whip everybody else up too.

That’s what it feels like when I’m being trolled. When somebody has trolled me, responding always seems desperately important, as if taking a moment or two to consider other options would be an act of cowardice and risk catastrophic loss of face.

But I’ve come to believe that those are precisely the times when it’s most important to take that moment, and use it to connect with your higher ideals, your deeper values, and the wide sweep of your life. After remembering the fullness of who you are, you can return to the current circumstances ready to apply your full creative intelligence, rather than do the knee-jerk thing the troll is probably counting on you to do.

So this week the featured post is about something else, because there’s a lot more to pay attention to than polls and the Donald. But of course, that stuff is happening too. So take a moment, and then we can plunge in.

OK, now let’s talk about violence

We’re not used to violence at American political rallies, and I hope we don’t get used to it. But it’s important to remember that the violence we’ve seen so far has been more threat than reality. It’s a dark cloud and a few sprinkles, not a rainstorm.

A few protesters inside the Trump rallies have been pushed or punched by Trump supporters, and a number have been dragged away by the security people, but I know of no serious injuries. Trump has talked about violence by protesters, but so far that seems to be mostly in his fevered imagination. The protesters who got inside the Chicago rally and caused its cancellation intended to be noticed and (in some cases) loud, but their prepared tactics focused on resisting violence, not using it. (I’ve heard several interviews where protesters talked about linking arms, a tactic that makes it hard for anybody to drag you away, but doesn’t threaten others.)

So far, the most noticeable violence has been in Trump’s rhetoric: He has talked about wanting to punch a protester in the face, instructed supporters to “knock the crap out of them“, offered to pay the defense costs of supporters who fight with protesters (he’s still deciding whether to follow through on that promise), and so on. He may eventually get violence on the scale he’s asking for, with people carried out on stretchers, but so far he hasn’t.

The Trump spokesman who announced the Chicago cancellation said it had been done after “meeting with law enforcement”, but (like so much that comes out of the Trump campaign) this seems to be misleading at best. Chicago Police deny advising cancellation, and had been confident of their ability to maintain order until thousands of Trump supporters were told they came all this way for nothing, with the implication that those protesters were to blame.

To me, the point of cancelling the Chicago rally was to change the media narrative about violence: Trump wants to shift blame onto the protesters and make himself the victim rather than the villain.

and the First Amendment

The line from the Trump campaign is that the protesters “shut down our First Amendment rights“. This is based on a perverse notion of the First Amendment that conservatives have been pushing at least since Sarah Palin in 2008:

If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.

As I define it in “A Conservative-to-English Lexicon”, First Amendment rights means “The right of a conservative to speak and write publicly without criticism.” The real First Amendment, though, works like this: If Trump wants to speak, he has a right to do so. But if other people want to protest non-violently, they have a right to do that too. Depending on how public the event is and whether protesters are inside or outside, Trump’s campaign may then have the right to demand they leave. But if the prospect of being heckled causes Trump to cancel a speech, that’s on him. Nobody has taken away his rights.

XKCD elaborates:

Trump’s exaggerated claim on First Amendment rights is widely shared among his followers. In a Frank Luntz focus group on Fox News, one Trump supporter complained that “You can’t even speak the truth any more or you’ll be called a racist or a bigot.” And the woman next to him chimed in: “I have a right to my opinion without being labeled something.”

No she doesn’t. This pernicious misconception of free speech survives from the days of overt white supremacy, when anyone who disagreed with the status quo was too intimidated to speak up.

In fact, you have no right to speak your mind “without being labeled something”. You do have a right to speak your mind, but if what you say convinces other people that you’re a bigot, an idiot, or whatever else, they have a right to speak their minds too.

Imagine if the same extended interpretation of the First Amendment applied to liberals: When Trump called Sanders a communist, he’d have been violating Bernie’s First Amendment rights. And that’s obviously ridiculous, even to a liberal like me.

Until the Chicago protests, everybody was talking about Sanders’ upset victory in Michigan

Last week I speculated that blacks, older voters, and middle-aged women looked like a winning coalition for Hillary Clinton, and said that Bernie Sanders would have to dent that somehow to pull out a Michigan win.

I also repeated Nate Silver’s reading of the polls: He wasn’t going to.

But he did. According to the exit poll, Clinton still carried the black vote, but not by the enormous margins she had been running up in the South. Michigan blacks went for Clinton 68%-28%, which is way less than in Tuesday’s other Democratic primary, Mississippi, where blacks chose Clinton 89%-11%.

Overall, independents made the difference. Only 69% of the Democratic primary electorate described themselves as Democrats, and they went for Clinton 58%-40%. Self-described independents went for Sanders 71%-28%.

In terms of delegates, Clinton continued moving towards nomination: She picked up 95 delegates and Sanders 71. According to the 538 model, Clinton is running 13% above a minimal victory pace, down slightly from 14% a week ago.

Nobody knows what this means for tomorrow’s primaries in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. In all those states, Clinton leads in the polls … just like she did in Michigan. The most unpredictable one has got to be Illinois: Like Michigan, it’s an open primary, so independents could make the difference. Also, local issues come into play: Bernie’s supporters are being credited/blamed for shutting down the Chicago Trump rally, which could move voters in either direction. Also, the unpopularity of Mayor Emanuel might drag Clinton down, and an unusually hotly contested states attorney primary is bringing Black Lives Matter voters to the polls.

and Trump keeps rolling (in BS)

Tuesday, after winning in Mississippi and Michigan, Donald Trump had the oddest victory celebration ever. He held a press conference instead of a rally (as he’s been doing lately), and called reporters’ attention to a table of “successful” Trump products to counter Mitt Romney’s claim that “a business genius he is not“.

That would be weird enough: At a moment when most candidates would be praising the wisdom of the voters and thanking all the volunteers whose hard work produced this important victory, Trump did an infomercial for his brand. But it’s actually weirder than that, because as The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper (and all the other reporters who bothered to investigate) discovered: “It’s all bullshit.” None of the products was what he said it was.

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This week’s guns-make-us-safer story is about Jamie Gilt, a Florida mom who had been boasting on Facebook about how much her 4-year-old son enjoys target shooting. (I mean: guns and preschoolers. What could possibly go wrong?)

Tuesday, she was driving with the boy in the back seat when he apparently got hold of a handgun on the floor and fired it through the driver’s seat, hitting his mother in the back. She survived.

Trying to display some former-First-Lady solidarity and find something nice to say about Nancy Reagan during the coverage of her funeral, Hillary came up with this:

It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan—in particular Mrs. Reagan—we started a national conversation.

Which is kind of the reverse of how things actually happened. A few hours later, she issued a statement walking it back. The Atlantic‘s “Gaffe Track” draws the moral:

Don’t speak ill of the dead, but don’t make things up about them, either.

The way conservative media preys on older people and changes their characters for the worse has been noted before, but now there’s a documentary about it, “The Brainwashing of My Dad” by Jen Senko.

I think the Supreme Court roadblock is going to cost incumbent Republicans in purple states, particularly if Trump is their nominee. I’ve seen this commercial about our NH incumbent senator:

Donald Trump wants the Senate to delay filling the Supreme Court vacancy so he can choose the nominee next year. And Senator Kelly Ayotte is right there to help. Ayotte joined Trump and party bosses in refusing to consider any nominee, ignoring the Constitution.

If you want to know what Republican one-party rule looks like, check out Kansas, where all notions of constitutionality and fair play have gone out the window.

President Obama’s job approval, which has been negative in the RCP polling average since June, 2013, is positive again.

One advantage I believe the Democrats are going to have this fall: Our convention is going to be inspiring and heart-warming. President Obama will get the send-off he deserves, the loser of the nomination struggle will make an impassioned speech about the importance of uniting to win, the VP will be somebody we can take pride in, and the entire week will highlight the positive human values that Democrats share.

By contrast, even if the Republicans manage to unite behind Trump and avoid a scorched-earth battle, their convention is going to be about scapegoating and raising anger, probably worse than the public-relations disasters of 1964 and 1992. The unpredictable, barely coherent ramble that makes a Trump rally speech so entertaining is going to play badly as an acceptance speech. It’s not going to be pretty.

A religion professor at Mercer University finds that the popularity of Trump and Cruz represent two distinct failures of Christian teaching. In Cruz he sees a failure of commission, a distortion of Christian priorities that is nonetheless taught in many churches and has been part of right-wing politics for many years. But Trump looks like a failure of omission. Churches aren’t teaching Trumpism, but their members aren’t getting the moral foundation for resisting it:

In the Christian moral formation of these supposed Christians they have not been offered an adequate inoculation against this kind of politics. What they needed was instruction in a version of Christianity with ironclad commitments to civility, solidarity, justice, mercy, compassion, rule of law, and human rights, commitments so strong and so well-engrained in believers that to support someone like Trump would be unthinkable. But they have not received that inoculation.

Lots of people have noticed that President Obama is aging, as presidents tend to do. But I don’t hear nearly as much talk about the far more remarkable fact that Michelle isn’t.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a medical test that gave me a lot of time to chat with the tech, a 50-ish woman who for some reason wanted to talk politics even though she claimed to have no interest in it. She had voted for Trump in the NH primary on the advice of her husband, who pays much more attention to such things than she does. But now she was having second thoughts. Trump seemed “dumb” and “a bully”, while John Kasich was looking much nicer.

I thought I might learn more from her than she would from me, so I didn’t interrupt.

She didn’t justify either her decision to vote for Trump or her subsequent regret by mentioning any policy at all. Not the wall, not the Muslim ban, not trade, not jobs, not America’s role in the world — nothing. Her son had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and is safely home now), but she didn’t talk about either finishing the job in those countries or avoiding similar boondoggles in the future.

For all non-political purposes she seemed like an intelligent, well-intentioned person. But presenting a policy argument to her would have been like talking to somebody who doesn’t follow baseball about whether the Red Sox overpaid for David Price or would have done better to spend that money last year to hang on to Jon Lester. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t see why you should, that’s the point.)

So consider this note a follow-up on the voter model I presented in “Say, you want a revolution?“. If you’re politically active, you need to understand that the voters may not be who you think they are, and their support or opposition probably doesn’t mean what you think it means.

I wonder if it’s significant that the final line of the Game of Thrones trailer is: “Apologies for what you are about to see.”

and let’s close with a view from far away

Funny or Die gives us the U.S. presidential race as seen from Finland.

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