The Weekly Sift

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.

and you might also be interested in

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.

We were trying to do some modeling on which states Trump is strong and weak in — there’s now enough polling across different states to do that — and the best correlate we could find for Trump’s support is Google searches for the N-word.

— Nate Silver, 538 podcast, 2-25-2016

This week’s featured post is “Trump is an opportunistic infection“. If you happen to be near Billerica, Massachusetts this Sunday morning at 11, I’ll be at First Parish Church updating one of my best social-justice sermons, “Who Owns the World?”

This week everybody was talking about the primary/caucus results

The week saw two wipe-outs: Trump dominated in the Nevada caucuses, getting 46% of the vote and destroying the idea that his support had a ceiling well below that. And Clinton had an even more impressive victory in South Carolina, defeating Bernie Sanders nearly 3-to-1, 74%-26%.

Tomorrow is the first multi-primary day. Both parties have contests in Arkansas, Georgia, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia, while Alabama has only a Republican primary.

Republicans. Until Tuesday, the conventional wisdom among Republicans was that the other candidates were vying to get into a one-on-one runoff with Trump, where the non-Trump candidate would surely win. And so here in New Hampshire, I saw countless anti-Rubio and anti-Cruz ads — and even anti-Christie and anti-Kasich ones — but virtually no attack ads against Donald Trump. Trump himself advertised very little, but held big rallies and did his usual impressive job of drawing free media attention. The others tore each other apart and Trump won.

Since Tuesday, Rubio in particular has been going after Trump, sometimes with some very personal ridicule, but Trump looks set to sweep the Super Tuesday states tomorrow anyway, with the possible exception of Cruz’ home state of Texas.

If that holds, I have a hard time seeing how Trump loses the nomination. Not just because his position is so commanding, but because I don’t know what scenario I’m counting on if I bet against him. Is Rubio suddenly going to become the dynamic candidate of Republican establishment fantasies, rather than the lightweight he otherwise seems to be? And as I explain in this week’s featured post, the best arguments against Trump are off-limits to Republicans.

Democrats. After Sanders’ big victory in New Hampshire, pundits talked about Clinton’s minority “firewall”: Hispanics in Nevada and blacks in South Carolina. Sanders supporters countered that while their candidate may have been slow to catch on among non-white Democrats, now that he was seen as a viable threat to Clinton the polls would change.

Nevada was inconclusive for that thesis: The caucus entrance polls said Sanders won the Hispanic vote, but by a margin well within the margin of error. Nonetheless, Nevada’s black vote came in overwhelmingly for Clinton and put her over the top.

But in South Carolina the firewall held, by a margin even larger than the Clinton people expected. Blacks increased their share of the primary electorate from 55% in 2008 to 61% in 2016, and Clinton got even more of their support than Barack Obama did: 84% rather than 78%. It’s official: Bernie Sanders has a black problem. You can argue that the problem arises through no fault of his own — he has a good civil rights record and hasn’t been race-baiting — but it’s there.

People ask me why this is, to which my first answer is: “I’m a white guy, what do I know?” If pressed, my second answer is that the slow, stuttering, back-and-forth progress of racial justice in America makes Bernie’s promise of “political revolution” sound like pie-in-the-sky to many blacks, while Clinton’s message (that progress is hard, and that we have to be as focused on defending what Obama has accomplished as we are on going further) seems more realistic. But if that doesn’t sound right to you, I’ll retreat to my first answer.

As for what to expect tomorrow, Nate Silver’s primary-prediction model gives Clinton a better-than-98% chance of winning Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The model gives her an 88% chance in Massachusetts and 75% in Oklahoma. It predicts a Sanders victory only in his home state of Vermont (99%).

Obviously, if that happens Clinton will have a huge lead in delegates come Wednesday morning. Does that mean the race will be over for all practical purposes? Not necessarily.

An interesting tool for analyzing the race is Nate’s list of state-by-state benchmarks. The methodology here is interesting: He’s projecting who would win each state by how much if the race were a 50-50 tie nationally. Nate’s list shows that tomorrow’s primary states are ones you would mostly expect to be good for Clinton, though she seems to be polling above his benchmarks. A better run of states for Sanders happens after March 15.

Nonetheless, another 538 analyst, Harry Enten, sees South Carolina as a major setback for Sanders: Until then, he had been gaining on the benchmark totals he needed to pull even, but in South Carolina he lost by nearly 50% rather than the 20% loss the benchmark predicted.

Tomorrow night, the state I’m going to be watching is Virginia, which should be a swing state in the fall. Nate’s benchmark is for Clinton to win by 9%. If the margin is less than that, Bernie might still make a comeback.

BTW, I’ll repeat a point I first mentioned a few months ago: The way you beat a bully is by making people laugh at him, and the Democrats have a great comedian in Senator Al Franken. Wouldn’t he be the perfect VP candidate if the Republicans nominate Trump?

and the Supreme Court

In something of a shocker, news leaked out of the White House the Republican Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada was being vetted for the Supreme Court. Sandoval favors business over labor, but also seems pro-environment and is said to have “moderate” views on abortion, whatever that means. In short, he’s exactly the kind of compromise you might expect Republicans to leap on, if they were at all inclined to do that kind of thing.

Apparently they aren’t. Floating Sandoval’s name didn’t move the needle at all, and the governor removed himself from consideration a few days later.

If Obama’s plan was to appoint Sandoval, Democrats might want to take their chances on winning the next election instead. But if he was just trying to show America how unreasonable the Republican position is, he succeeded.

while some discussed the undisguised racism among Trump supporters

Just before the South Carolina primary, a pro-confederate-flag protest turned into a spontaneous Trump rally. A reporter for the Young Turks interviewed participants, who warned of “ethnic cleansing” against whites and expected Trump to do something about it.

In Iowa, fans at a white high school began chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” after losing a basketball game to a team with more non-white players. It’s hard to say exactly what they meant by it, but apparently his name either invokes white pride or is supposed to intimidate non-whites.

The important question is whether these examples are just random anomalies, or if they point to some larger phenomenon. Tuesday, when Chris Hayes interviewed Trump supporters at the Nevada caucuses, he found a bunch of nice people, some of whom had decided that Trump’s more outrageous statements were just showmanship and not to be taken seriously. (However, my personal experience indicates that a lot of racists are nice people when they talk to a pleasant white man like Chris.)

One way to research this question is through polls. For example, Public Policy Polling found that 38% of Trump supporters in South Carolina wish the South had won the Civil War, and various other polls have turned up additional disturbing results. But again, these results may be anecdotal, or may be blaming Trump for bad attitudes that could be found among many candidates’ supporters.

Nate Silver’s 538 web site specializes in poll-watching. A regular feature of the staff’s weekly podcasts is to review news stories about polls and ask whether they represent a good or bad use of the underlying data. Thursday’s podcast was headlined “Racism among Trump’s supporters“, and the overall conclusion is that yes, there is something in this data. Nate Silver said:

I resisted for a long time the notion, because again it is kind of a default for people on the Left, that “Oh, this is all about race.” But, like, I have almost come full circle the other direction, to where I think the media is not talking about this enough. And I think the centrist Joe-Scarborough pundits who are like “Oh, Trump will really shake things up” [have] to acknowledge the fact that some of this support is a result — maybe not a majority, I think probably just a plurality — but some of the support is a result of … of some of the worst impulses that Americans can have. And to indulge that, I think, is something people should be thinking about more carefully.

while I was struck by

a poll from AP-GfK, based on interviews between February 11 and 15. Most of the poll consists of typical questions: whether the country is on the right or wrong track, how well President Obama is doing his job, how important various issues are, and so on.

But things get interesting on page 21, when they ask:

Would you favor or oppose replacing the current private health insurance system in the United States with a single government-run and taxpayer-funded plan like Medicare for all Americans that would cover medical, dental, vision, and long-term care services?

A plurality favors the program, 39%-33%, which sounds good for ambitious liberals. But then they start filling in details, and approval drops.

What I think we’re seeing here is the low-engagement voter problem that I discussed a few weeks ago in “Say — you want a revolution?” Large numbers of voters have not thought through the issues well enough to have a coherent position. So if you ask them the wrong question and take their answer too seriously, you can easily get misled.

Republicans run into this problem when they ask people about government spending. Polls show that by a wide margin people believe the government spends too much. But when you get specific about what to cut, you find that the public also supports just about everything the government spends money on. What do they want less of? Bridges to nowhere, welfare for able-bodied adults who refuse to work, foreign aid to countries that hate us, and subsidized art projects that offend them — all of which adds up to way less than 1% of the budget. The other 99-point-something percent they’re fine with.

That’s why Republicans have learned not to specify their cuts, but to run on across-the-board reductions that make somebody else pick the victims. As Ben Carson put it: “Now anybody who tells me there’s not 3 to 4 percent fat in virtually everything that we do is fibbing to themselves.” Does that mean he wants to cut your Mom’s Social Security or your uncle’s veteran benefits by 3-4%? No, of course not! How can you think such a thing?

The contradiction that gets Democrats in trouble is that people love progress, but they hate change. Maybe there’s a great plan to improve public schools — and God knows that schools in general need improvement — but if your kid likes his teacher and has some friends in his class, you’re going to look at that plan skeptically. And I know that American health care is way too expensive and doesn’t cover everybody, but personally I understand how my insurance plan works and I like my doctor, so do I really want to shake things up?

Tell people that you’re going to improve things, and they’ll love it. Tell them that their own lives are going to have to change in incompletely specified ways that are probably going to be more positive than negative, and they’ll doubt you.

That’s how the insurance companies beat HillaryCare in 1993. That’s why ObamaCare’s worst press was about people whose insurance plans got cancelled. Almost invariably, the people in those stories eventually got a better deal, but that didn’t matter. They were forced to change, and change is scary.

In 2017, Medicare-for-All will have exactly the same problem. Will masses of people take to the streets to demand Congress pass it? Will filibustering senators fear the wrath of the American people in the 2018 elections? I’m skeptical.

I also think it’s interesting to speculate on what the same question might mean to different respondents. For example, on page 14  of the AP-GfK poll you find: “Which party do you trust to do a better job of handling the U.S. image abroad?” The numbers are close: 27% trust the Democrats more; 26% the Republicans, which is not a statistically significant difference.

But I suspect those two groups of people aren’t really answering the same question at all. If you’re a Democrat, probably the “image abroad” you worry about is that we’re crazy assholes: We start wars for little-to-no reason; we torture people; we want veto power over other countries’ revolutions; we think the rules that apply to every other nation in the world shouldn’t apply to us. So you want Democrats in office to make us behave like good citizens of the world.

But if you’re Republican, probably the image you worry about is that we’re pushovers; you want Republicans in office to convince foreigners not to mess with us. If we have to drop bombs and waterboard people to get that point across, so be it.

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Andrew Hacker in the NYT magazine imagines teaching statistics for understanding the real world.

and let’s close with something creative

Trump in Westeros.

Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

— John Donne
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

Ding-dong, the witch is dead. — The Wizard of Oz (1939)

This week’s featured post is “Back to Ferguson“, which I’ll explain below.

In the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, I’m taking a week off from presidential politics. Next week we’ll have the Democratic caucuses in Nevada and the Republican primary in South Carolina to talk about. Both happen Saturday.

This week everybody was talking about Justice Scalia’s death

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s final act, as far as I was concerned, was to posthumously remind me that I am not as good a person as I like to think.

Good People, as I picture them, see death as the great leveler, the ultimate reminder of our common humanity. Like John Donne, they believe the bell tolls for them. Every death — even necessary ones like casualties in a just war or criminals killed in the act of trying to kill somebody else — is tragic: How sad it is that a situation might make a person’s death the lesser evil.

Under no circumstances would news of someone’s death cause a Good Person’s heart to take an involuntary leap of joy. Or inspire a Good Person to say, “I wonder if Justice Thomas will follow his lead this time too?”

Bad. Bad, bad, bad.

But at least my badness puts me in some good company. As Clarence Darrow wrote, “I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

Scalia’s career. You can read more complete obituaries of Scalia elsewhere. Here’s how I remember him: When President Reagan appointed him in 1986, he was alone on the Court’s far right wing. Outnumbered, he became famous for his thought-provoking dissenting opinions, which were principled, but based on principles different from the ones that motivated the rest of the Court. Liberals developed a kind of grudging admiration for him; you knew in your heart he had to be wrong, but it was often very hard to explain why. Anticipating his criticisms made us sharper — like iron sharpens iron, as the Bible says.

But late in his career, as part of a conservative majority, he became the Court’s most openly partisan judge. His opinions became elaborate rationalizations of why his side should win, regardless of principle. And so, he had a sweeping view of the Constitution’s commerce clause when that was necessary to keep marijuana illegal, but an unprecedently narrow view of the same text when he needed a reason to strike down ObamaCare. He waxed eloquent about legislator’s original intent when that was convenient, but violated it outrageously by finding corporate rights in places the authors of the Constitution clearly never intended. He was part of the nakedly political 5-4 majority that made George W. Bush president, a decision so unabashedly partisan that it explicitly warned future Courts not to use it as a precedent. He attended secretive meetings of the Koch Brothers’ donor network, as (enabled by Scalia’s vote in the 5-4 Citizens United decision) it raised vast sums of money to elect Republicans.

Beyond his unprincipled partisanship, Scalia will be remembered for undermining the traditional decorum of the Court. As he aged, he seemed less and less able to imagine that an intelligent, well-intentioned colleague might disagree with him, and showed less and less restraint in flinging oddly Victorian insults (like “argle-bargle” and “jiggery-pokery”) at their arguments.

Replacement? Mitch McConnell wasted no time in warning President Obama not to bother appointing a replacement.

The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.

Elizabeth Warren fired back:

Senator McConnell is right that the American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice. In fact, they did — when President Obama won the 2012 election by five million votes.

She goes on to remind McConnell of the constitutional duties of the President and the Senate. I think that’s the right line here: Let’s follow the Constitution, which is pretty clear:

[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.

So it’s simple: Obama should do his job by appointing someone and the Senate should do its job by voting on that nomination.

As much as the Republicans may hope for a Republican president whose appointments will cement the Court’s conservative majority for decades to come, I think that position is suicidal when it comes to holding the Senate. Take the NH seat: Senator Kelly Ayotte has been running not as a down-the-line Republican, but as an exemplar of New Hampshire’s traditionally independent common sense. (Along with another endangered Republican incumbent, Mark Kirk of Illinois, she is a founding member of a small group of Republican senators who recognize global warming.) If Mitch McConnell were running here, he would lose. Turning the race into a simple red/blue contest for control of the Senate, and hence the Court, helps Ayotte’s challenger, Gov. Maggie Hassan.

It also probably helps the eventual Democratic presidential nominee to have a court appointment riding on the outcome. Control of the Supreme Court — not just possibly someday, but immediately — would give either Hillary or Bernie a powerful uniting message after a divisive primary campaign.

Who, then? Various short lists of possible Obama appointees are floating around. At the top of most of them is Sri Srinivasin, who was approved by the Senate unanimously for his current job as a federal appellate judge.

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.

Recess appointment. Unofficial reports say that Obama will not make a temporary recess appointment, which he could attempt since the Senate is currently not in session. But that path is filled with technicalities and possible disputes. SCOTUS blog summarizes:

The bottom line is that, if President Obama is to successfully name a new Supreme Court Justice, he will have to run the gauntlet of the Republican-controlled Senate, and prevail there.  The only real chance of that: if he picks a nominee so universally admired that it would be too embarrassing for the Senate not to respond.

My suggestion for a recess appointment: Sandra Day O’Connor. She retired to spend more time with her husband, who has since died, and she’s still active as a part-time substitute judge at the appellate level. As a replacement for Scalia, she would move the Court somewhat to the left. But it would be hard for Republicans to justify blocking a judge originally appointed by the sainted President Reagan.

Interesting sidebar here: The Court recently issued a stay blocking President Obama’s plan to limit the carbon emissions of power plants. That indicated that, when the case reaches them from its current location in an appellate court, the Supremes might be inclines to strike it down, almost certainly by the 5-4 ideological split it then had.

Without Scalia, though, and assuming a decision has to be made before he can be replaced, the Court will reach a 4-4 non-decision, and the lower court ruling will stand. The appellate court seems likely to uphold Obama’s action.

and the budget

Another example of the Republicans’ refusal to recognize Obama’s legitimacy as president is that the House is not planning to hold hearings on his budget proposal.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House budget committees said last week they were forgoing the decades-long tradition of hearing testimony from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, claiming they expected Obama’s budget to offer little in debt reduction.

and Oregon

The occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge ended Thursday morning after 41 days, when the last four guys surrendered to the FBI. The occupiers got no concessions: The two ranchers whose re-imprisonment sparked the occupation remain in prison. No changes in federal land use policy have been announced. The leaders of the occupation have been arrested and charged.

A bonus was that Cliven Bundy, father of occupation leader Ammon Bundy and the center of a previous armed stand-off in 2014, has also been arrested and charged.

In a 32-page criminal complaint, prosecutors allege Bundy and his co-conspirators led a massive, armed assault against federal officers in April 2014 near the town of Bunkerville, Nev.

According to the U.S. attorney for Nevada, Bundy and his armed supporters on horseback effectively ambushed federal Bureau of Land Management officials as they were trying to round up 400 of Bundy’s cows illegally grazing on federal land.

The way the government backed down from that confrontation undoubtedly emboldened the Malheur occupiers. Bundy and his allies considered the 2014 showdown a victory. If the Malheur occupiers had walked away with concessions, that also would have been a victory, and quite likely would have led to an even more aggressive move in the future.

So far, it looks like the government has played this right: No police or government agents were killed. One occupier died in a confrontation that appears to have been largely of his own making. The government wanted a middle path between the 2014 Bundy showdown and Ruby Ridge; it seems to have found one.

Apparently the evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy’s son) played a role in the surrender of the final occupiers. I’ll be interested to see if he becomes a spokesman for the militiamen.

but more people should be paying attention to Ferguson

That’s covered in this week’s featured post “Back to Ferguson“. The Justice Department says policing in Ferguson has to change to uphold its citizens’ constitutional rights. Ferguson replies: We can’t afford it. So where does the buck stop?

and Darwin

Friday was Charles Darwin’s 207th birthday. That’s my annual reminder to review the evolution/creation discussion.

I said most of what I want to say about it three years ago in “Evolution/Creation for Non-Eggheads“. One thing to add since then: My friend (and occasional Sift commenter) Abby Hafer has published The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why evolution explains the human body and intelligent design does not. Her introduction says:

A few years ago, I realized that the whole intelligent design (ID) controversy is not a scientific issue, but a political one. … ID is not a theory, it is a political pressure group. …

Political issues require political arguments, and political arguments are different [from scientific arguments]. Political arguments must be short, easy to understand, memorable, and preferably entertaining.

In my case, I also want them to be true.

One point from the “Non-Eggheads” post I’d like to hit a little harder: If you ever listen to a Creationism/ID talk, you won’t actually hear an alternative scientific theory. Instead, such talks invariably focus on criticisms of evolution (most of which were made and answered in the 1800s). Why? Because they have no alternative scientific theory to present.

Let me give an example to flesh that out a little. According to current evolutionary theory, life on Earth has a single family tree. In other words, any two living things have a common ancestor if you go back far enough. A lot of work has gone into figuring out how that tree branches, what is more closely related to what, and when the common ancestors lived. That work is ongoing, and every now and then our picture of the tree shifts a little as new evidence emerges.

It’s fine to criticize that single-family-tree idea, but a real Creationist alternative theory would answer this very basic question: How many separate family trees are there, even approximately? And that leads to other questions: Did they all begin at the same time? What markers tell us that two living things are from different trees? Then you get to a bunch of more specific research topics: Do lions and house cats have a common ancestor? Collies and poodles? Polar bears and grizzlies? What about the 400,000 species of beetles biologists have postulated? Did 400,000 separate acts of creation lead to 400,000 family trees of beetles, or do some beetle species share a common ancestor?

That’s the kind of stuff a real “creation science” would be researching. You never hear about it, though, because there is no such research and no such theory. Creationist “scientific” organizations spend their money, as Abby says, constructing and popularizing political arguments rather than doing science.

Tax money is still supporting teaching Creationism in Louisiana, and probably other states as well.

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When Franklin Graham isn’t mediating between the FBI and crazy people, he’s touring America to rally religious conservatives to be more politically active.

I don’t think we’re going to make it another election cycle if we don’t get God’s voice back in the political arena. … I feel that we are going to have to meet our political obligations as Christians and make our voice known if America is to be preserved with the type of Christian heritage which has given us the liberties we now enjoy. For unless America turns back to God, repents of its sin, and experiences a spiritual revival, we will fail as a nation.

According to Graham, one “great sin that has been flaunted and celebrated” is same-sex marriage.

Here’s what continually amazes me about all the God-will-punish-us-if-we-don’t-turn-back prophecies: When was that God-fearing era we need to “turn back” to? When we were committing genocide against the Native Americans and holding millions of Africans in slavery? Or was it later, during the era of Jim Crow and lynchings? Or when we dropped atomic bombs on cities full of Japanese civilians?

I have a hard time picturing — much less respecting — a God who would shower us with blessings while we were doing all that stuff, but is going to drop us flat now that we’re letting same-sex couples live together in loving relationships.

This week’s guns-make-us-safer story: A guy in Texas opened fire on his neighbor’s puppy, who was trespassing on his lawn. A friend of the puppy’s owner shot back. The dog died. Neither human was wounded, but both are facing felony charges.

Guns don’t kill puppies. Crazy Texans with guns kill puppies.

One of David Wong’s “5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story” is that it’s about “a lawmaker saying something stupid”. He points out that there are so many state legislators that on any given day one of them is bound to have said or done something ignorant or offensive. For that reason, I don’t call your attention to bad laws just because they get proposed in some legislature; I wait to see if they have any real support.

Well, this one does: Senate Bill 1556 made it out of a committee in the Tennessee Senate on 7-1 party-line vote. (That tells you something about the Tennessee Senate right there; there are barely enough Democrats to get one on every committee.) It allows counselors and therapists to refuse to counsel clients “as to goals, outcomes, or behaviors that conflict with a sincerely held religious belief of the counselor or therapist”. The counselor’s only obligation is to provide a referral.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the bill “seeks to protect conservative therapists from 2014 changes in the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics“, which states:

Counselors refrain from referring prospective and current clients based solely on the counselor’s personally held values, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Counselors respect the diversity of clients and seek training in areas in which they are at risk of imposing their values onto clients, especially when the counselor’s values are inconsistent with the client’s goals or are discriminatory in nature.

This is yet another example of conservatives abandoning their ideal of “small government” when it proves inconvenient. In short, the counseling profession is not allowed to establish its own code of ethics free from government meddling.

and let’s close with something crazy

A huge controversy erupted after Beyonce sang “Formation” at the Super Bowl, while dressed to honor the Black Panthers. But there’s a background level of crazy here that I previously had not noticed: More than 800K viewers have seen a video detailing all the Illuminati symbolism in previous Super Bowl halftime shows. I mean, we all knew about Madonna (right?), but who suspected Katy Perry of being “a high-level Illuminati witch”? I’ll have to go back and look at her videos again.

Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.

— Theodore Roosevelt (1904)

This week’s featured post is “Undecided With 8 Days To Go“.

This week everybody was talking about the presidential race

The Iowa Caucuses start this evening. Most recent polls show a close race with a small advantage to Clinton. But Iowa has such a weird process that polling often gets it wrong.

On the Republican side, polls show that Cruz peaked about three weeks ago, and that Trump has regained a medium-sized lead, even though his numbers have been falling too for the last week. But since he never developed a ground game, nobody can say how many Trump supporters will get to the caucuses and stay long enough to make their votes count. Cruz is still running second, but fading. Rubio is third and rising, so it’s not impossible that he could finish second, or even first if Trump’s voters don’t show up.

Tomorrow, I expect the media to be saying that Rubio’s showing was the most surprising, and that he has momentum going into New Hampshire. But I don’t think I’ll be buying that interpretation if he doesn’t actually win. I think Obama/Clinton in 2008 showed that there is no “momentum”. Only votes and delegates are real.

Friday morning I tried to see Donald Trump in Nashua, but it turns out that having a ticket and being 45 minutes early wasn’t good enough; I was third in line when they announced that the room had reached its fire-safety capacity. Hundreds of people were still in line behind me, so I’m not sure what the point of having a ticket was.

But most of what I wanted to do was observe the crowd, so I got to do a little of that while standing in line. Everybody I saw was white, which isn’t that big a surprise in New Hampshire. Men outnumbered women, maybe three to one. Nobody was wearing or saying anything overtly racist or anti-Muslim. People didn’t bring signs and I didn’t see any protesters. We didn’t chant slogans or get rowdy. For a group of supposedly angry voters, we were all surprisingly docile as we waited in the sort-of-cold until we were told to go home.

The guys in front of me hadn’t definitely committed to Trump yet, but they thought Cruz had looked bad in the previous night’s debate, the one Trump boycotted. They agreed that Hillary Clinton has “no chance” and speculated about whether she’d be indicted for the email thing. They were sure she deserved to be indicted, but disagreed about whether Obama would allow it.

Speaking of Cruz, I loved Josh Marshall’s take on why he looked bad in the debate. (Josh was in Cruz’ residential college at Princeton, but in 2013 claimed not to recall him until his wife jogged his memory.)

My general sense is that it wasn’t that Cruz got attacked or that the attacks on him did any particular damage. It was that the spotlight was inherently bad for him. … This whole portion of the debate – which lasted for maybe the first 45 minutes or so – had the feeling of walking into a conversation at a party that’s just very awkward and uncomfortable – because it’s Ted Cruz holding court and pontificating. And you want to leave. Again, it’s not that the attacks were particularly biting or damaging. It’s just that you saw Cruz up close. And he’s not pleasant to be around.

I also don’t think Trump’s event competing with the debate did him any good. (I can’t imagine it playing well in Iowa when Trump called another rich New York developer up to the stage with his young trophy wife. I suspect Trump’s own marriage is not something middle-aged Iowa housewives want to dwell on too long.) So Trump and Cruz both looking bad recently is another reason Rubio could do better than expected.

We now have Trump’s plan for replacing ObamaCare: “We’ll work something out” with the doctors and hospitals, he says. I don’t know why no one had thought of that before.

A questioner told Ted Cruz about his brother-in-law, who didn’t have health insurance until ObamaCare, but started seeing a doctor too late and died of cancer. “What are you going to replace [ObamaCare] with?” he asked.

Cruz responded like this:

there are millions who had health insurance, who liked their health insurance and who had it cancelled because of Obamacare … millions are losing their insurance now and if we allow people to purchase across state lines, it will drive down the cost where they can afford it and get it earlier. [Your brother-in-law] would have gotten [health insurance] earlier if he could have afforded it earlier, but because of government regulations he couldn’t.

It’s worth pointing out that the regulation that raises costs the most is the government’s perverse insistence that health insurance actually cover you if you get sick. Policies that include ways for the insurance company to weasel out of covering sick people can be amazingly cheap. And if you never get sick, you never know.

and Flint

Exposé news stories have a stereotypical trajectory: There’s a problem that officials are sweeping under the rug, but journalists or whistleblowers uncover it. And then things get taken care of. The problem is fixed, victims get the help they need (better late than never), and the irresponsible officials are disgraced. Happy ending.

That doesn’t seem to be happening in Flint. The first part — problem, rug, uncovering — follows the script. And while Governor Rick Snyder hasn’t been forced to resign (yet), some lower-level people have, and I think Snyder’s political career is pretty much over. But the problem is a long way from fixed.

Here’s the gist: The emergency manager Snyder appointed to run Flint, supplanting the elected government,  decided to change the city’s water source. Rather than buy Lake Huron water from Detroit, they’d pump it out of the Flint River. Lots of towns use river water and it’s not a big deal, but you need to account for the fact that river water can be more corrosive. If you don’t treat the water somehow, it can leach lead out of pipes and slowly poison the people who drink it. (Flint’s water mains are iron, but many of the pipes that connect houses to the mains are lead.)

So now Flint is back to using Detroit’s water, and the long-term plan to have its own pipeline to Lake Huron is on track for completion in June. But that hasn’t solved the problem, because the lead didn’t come from the river, it came from the pipes. A lot of faucets in a lot of homes still have elevated lead — some many times higher than the recommended filters can handle — and nobody knows how long that will continue.

The sure solution is to find all the lead pipes and replace them, but that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which nobody is volunteering to pay. But waiting for the lead levels to come down on their own — drinking, cooking, and bathing with bottled water in the meantime — gets old in a hurry.

And then there are the long-term effects of lead exposure on children’s brains. Is the state going to take responsibility for that? How?

In the background of this whole story are issues of race and class. Flint is poor and mostly black. Poverty is why the city was in the financial trouble that got an emergency manager appointed in the first place. And whether the suffering of poor blacks registers with state officials the way wealthier white suffering would, well …

Wednesday, Rachel Maddow devoted her whole show to a townhall meeting in Flint, talking to local residents and various experts on water and plumbing and lead poisoning. That series of videos starts here.

and the arrest of Ammon Bundy

Tuesday night, the authorities finally did something about the militia occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon. The leaders of the occupation were arrested on their way to a community meeting set up by supporters in the nearby town of John Day. Unofficial spokesman Lavoy Finicum was killed.

Supporters have tried to make a martyr out of Finicum and claim that the government intentionally murdered him, but the FBI eventually released aerial video of the confrontation: Finicum’s truck stops for several minutes on the highway as police cars flash their lights behind it. Then the truck races forward until it gets to a police roadblock. At that point it tries to drive around the roadblock and gets stuck in the snow. Finicum gets out of the truck with his hands up (his passengers stay inside), but doesn’t appear to be surrendering as he sidles further off the road, away from police. When he reaches into his coat he gets shot. Police claim they found a handgun in his coat.

Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan are among the arrested. They have been charged with a felony that seems designed for this situation (actually it was designed for Confederates seizing federal outposts in the Civil War): conspiracy to impede officers of the United States from discharging their official duties through the use of force, intimidation, or threats.

A handful of holdouts (maybe five) are still occupying the refuge. Like Bundy, they seem to grossly overestimate their negotiating position: They want to leave without charges, or maybe to be guaranteed a pardon. But the FBI is only interested in talking about how they’re going to surrender. The authorities seem to be tightening up a little more all the time; they’ve now cut off internet and cellphone access.

Bundy, meanwhile, has asked the remaining occupiers to go home, possibly because the judge in Portland can’t see offering him bail while there’s an armed camp he could try to run to.

This fight is ours for now in the courts. Please go home. Being in the system, we are going to take this opportunity to answer the questions on Art. 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the United States Constitution regarding rights of statehood and the limits on federal property ownership.

Once again, he’s picturing himself as a sovereign citizen meeting the government on equal terms. But I predict his trial will concern the crimes the government has charged him with, not the crimes he charges the government with. (Regarding “the limits of federal property ownership”, I suspect that the State of Oregon might have standing to pursue this in a different court, but Bundy himself does not, and it certainly isn’t relevant here. Even in the appropriate venue, I think Oregon would lose that case.)

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Once again, headlines indicate that something maybe-sorta might come of the Clinton emails. But Dianne Feinstein still doesn’t think so.

The latest revelations that Secretary Clinton’s emails include classified information lack the same key information as previous reports. First, the 22 emails the State Department has labeled classified are part of seven separate back-and-forth email chains, and none of those emails chains originated with Secretary Clinton.

So: Seven times during her Secretary of State years, somebody sent her an email containing information that wasn’t marked classified at the time, but in hindsight should have been.

Reuters claims the info was “foreign government information”

The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.

I wish we had a control on this experiment: If we looked at all the emails of some other State or Defense secretary chosen at random, how many similar examples would we find?

The best thing since President Bush’s “Is our children learning?”

This white giraffe ought to be the center of a cult.

and let’s close with something timeless

It’s amazing how well the climactic speech of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” stands up after 75 years.

Our collective futures depend on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen. To vote. To speak out. To stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, stood up for us.

— President Barack Obama, the 2016 State of the Union address

This week’s featured posts are “The Positive Republican Message, Annotated” and “There’s a Lot to Know about the Militia Takeover“. As always on MLK Monday, I want to flash back to my attempt to guard the radical career of Martin Luther King against those who would reduce it one over-simplified quote: “MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection“.

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

Tuesday, President Obama gave his final State of the Union address. [video, text] I see it as the beginning of his victory lap: No matter what you may hear from the Republican presidential candidates, the United States is much better off than it was when he took office. Other than ObamaCare or the Iran nuclear deal, his accomplishments haven’t been flashy. But he came into office telling his administration “Don’t do stupid stuff” — like invading Iraq, say, or passing another huge tax cut for the rich — and for the most part they haven’t. It’s amazing how well America can do if the president isn’t doing stupid stuff.

No doubt the victory lap will peak with an appearance at the Democratic convention this summer. I expect the delegates to clap for a long, long time.

Another recent Obama broadcast is his “Guns in America” townhall conversation on CNN January 7. [video, transcript]

and Iran

This week President Obama frustrated yet again everyone who wants a war with Iran. Tuesday, Iran seized two American patrol boats and the ten sailors aboard them, claiming they had entered Iranian waters (which seems to be true). The next day the boats and the sailors were released without anyone needing to “unleash the full force and fury of the United States” as Ted Cruz pledged to do at Thursday night’s presidential debate.

At the time the nuclear deal with Iran was being debated in Congress, critics objected that the Obama administration was “leaving behind” several Americans held in Iran, including Christian minister Saeed Abedini and Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. The administration argued that those negotiations were better handled separately rather than putting everything together in an omnibus package. Well, Saturday, the United States and Iran completed a prisoner swap that included Abedini and Rezaian. They weren’t left behind.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Saturday also marked the end of economic sanctions against Iran, as the International Atomic Energy Agency verified that Iran had complied with its part of the nuclear deal. The sanctions had frozen Iran’s deposits in the international banking system, which have been estimated anywhere from $50-$150 billion.

Republican candidates try to make this sound like a U.S. payoff to the Iranians. For example, Donald Trump characterized the deal as: “They get $150 billion, plus seven [prisoners] and we get four [prisoners].” But the money was always theirs; we were simply holding it hostage. Obama “gave” the Iranians nothing.

What the end of sanctions will do is let Iran return to the international oil market. The anticipation of Iranian oil coming onto the market is part of why oil prices have been collapsing lately. So yes, President Obama does deserve some credit for gas prices falling below $2 a gallon.

and the continuing Oregon militia stand-off

I cover that in “There’s a Lot to Know about the Militia Takeover“.

and deaths of cultural icons

If you’re my age, chances are David Bowie meant something special to you. It was always hard to separate his life from his art, and now it is hard to separate his death from his art, as in the “Lazarus” video from his final album Blackstar.

Alan Rickman also died this week. For most people he’s Professor Snape, but I’ll always remember him as the Metatron in Dogma. Oh, that voice. Or maybe that voice up a few octaves.

I feel remiss in not having noted the death of Meadowlark Lemon when it happened at the end of 2015. Like all athletes who make it into their 80s, Meadowlark long outlived his glory days. Many young people probably know nothing about him, and possibly nothing about the Harlem Globetrotters in general, who still exist but aren’t the cultural force they once were.

The Globetrotters began in an era when American professional sports leagues were still segregated, and black athleticism was only safe for whites if it came wrapped in comedy. (In baseball, Satchel Paige was a similar package of athletic skill and comedic showmanship.)

In Meadowlark’s lifetime the NBA was open to blacks, but for working-class white boys of my generation it still was chancy to openly imitate black stars like Bill Russell or Oscar Robertson. (I never told anybody that my reverse lay-up was styled after a photo of Elgin Baylor. That’s one reason the “Be Like Mike” series of Gatorade commercials in the 90s — with kids of all races pretending to be Michael Jordan — could sometimes make me tear up.) But imitating a funny stunt by Meadowlark or his wild-dribbling teammate Curly Neal was OK.

and the Episcopal Church

The Episcopal Church is one of the oldest religious organizations in America, going back to the Church of England’s extension to the North American colonies. George Washington attended the Church of Virginia, which why a bust of him has been in the crypt of St. Paul’s in London since 1921. (I’ve seen it.)

Thursday, that centuries-old connection frayed, as a convocation of primates from the Anglican churches of 44 countries met in Canterbury, and suspended the Episcopal Church from participation in governance of the Anglican Communion. The primates’ official statement says:

we formally acknowledge this distance by requiring that for a period of three years The Episcopal Church no longer represent us on ecumenical and interfaith bodies, should not be appointed or elected to an internal standing committee and that while participating in the internal bodies of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in decision making on any issues pertaining to doctrine or polity.

The “distance” arises from the Episcopalians’ increasing tolerance of homosexuality, which is particularly odious to the African Anglican leaders. An openly gay Episcopal bishop was elected in 2003, and same-sex marriages were officially recognized in July. The role of women is also an issue, though many other Anglican churches ordain women as priests. Katharine Jefferts Schori was presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church from 2006-2014.

Such issues have led to the formation of a rival Anglican Church in North America, which is not officially recognized by the Anglican Communion, but is recognized by numerous African Anglican churches.

It’s hard to see how this issue resolves in three years, or in anything other than a permanent separation, since Episcopalians don’t seem likely to back down. “We’re committed to being a house of prayer for all,” said current Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. The most eloquent expression of that position came from Jim Naughton, the former head of the archdiocese of Washington, D.C.: “We can’t repent what is not sin.”

The Daily Beast‘s Jay Michaelson sees the Anglican/Episcopal rift as

just the surface of a much deeper division, reflecting the polarization of Christian life in the 21st century.

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This week’s guns-make-us-safer story concerns an Ohio man who killed his son. The 14-year-old’s skipping-school plan involved sneaking back into the basement after apparently going out to catch the bus. His father heard a noise downstairs and shot at what he believed to be an intruder.

Sociologist Victor Tan Chen elaborates on the recent study showing declining life expectancy for working-class whites, predominately due to despair-related health problems (like suicide and addiction) in middle age. Chen focuses not just on the declining economic opportunities for less-educated whites (a problem they share with less-educated non-whites, whose life expectancy is still increasing), but the simultaneous decline in sources of community (like church or union membership), and in long-term marriages. When economic disaster strikes, a go-it-alone attitude and an ideal of rugged individualism may leave a person more vulnerable to despair than a better-connected person who is even worse off financially.

Charles Alan Martin tells how his thinking about Black Lives Matter has changed:

Up until this point, I’ve stubbornly held onto the presumption that BLM needed to somehow deliver their message in a way I could find palatable when, in reality, I wasn’t owed a damned thing.

I had a similar realization just before I wrote “Why BLM Protesters Can’t Behave“.

The debate over whether Ted Cruz is a “natural born citizen” of the United States — which the Constitution mentions as a requirement for the presidency — has heated up.

I admit, it’s satisfying to watch Cruz have to deal with this after all the completely baseless noise he and his fellow conservatives (like his Dad, for example) made about President Obama’s citizenship. I think this is a bullshit issue, but Cruz has made a career out of bullshit.

Even so, my position is simple: We have to respect the clear constitutional requirements (like being at least 35 years old), but any ambiguity should be interpreted to maximize voter choice. I will be very sad (and worried) if the American people elect Ted Cruz as our next president. But the place to stop him is at the ballot box; I don’t want to disqualify him on a technicality.

Cruz is also dealing with the revelation that he funded his Senate campaign with loans from Goldman Sachs, where his wife works, and didn’t report it properly. NPR explains the possible ramifications.

And I question how much influence David Brooks has on the Republican electorate, but the conservative NYT columnist wasn’t pulling any punches in “The Brutalism of Ted Cruz“:

Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. … He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.

BTW, “tribal, blood and soil European conservatism” sounds to me like a roundabout way of saying “fascism”.

And while I’m on that subject (again), here’s a fascinating historical tidbit from Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism:

The term national socialism seems to have been invented by the French nationalist author Maurice Barrès, who described the aristocratic adventurer the Marquis de Morès in 1896 as “the first national socialist.” Morès, after failing as a cattle rancher in North Dakota, returned to Paris in the early 1890s and organized a band of anti-Semitic toughs who attacked Jewish shops and offices. As a cattleman, Morès found his recruits among the slaughterhouse workers in Paris, to whom he appealed with a mixture of anticapitalism and anti-Semitic nationalism. His squads wore the cowboy garb and ten-gallon hats that the marquis had discovered in the American West, which thus predate black and brown shirts (by a modest stretch of the imagination) as the first fascist uniform.

Keep that in mind as you watch Ammon Bundy and his fellow militia yahoos in Oregon.

Some insight into Trump supporters from a Muslim woman who attended a rally in a hijab.

Now that Michael Bay’s Benghazi movie 13 Hours is out, the long-debunked myths about Benghazi are likely to be trotted out again. Fortunately, Media Matters has put together a convenient video debunking yet again the four biggest Benghazi myths. Bookmark it, and use as needed in Facebook arguments.

Sky Palma@DeadStateTweets:

If you vote for a party that’s against government regulation, don’t be surprised if your tap water ends up poisoning you. #FlintWaterCrisis

and let’s close with something you can start watching tonight

War and Peace, the miniseries.