The Weekly Sift

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you …

— Rudyard Kipling

It is no accident that President Obama’s America has given rise to Donald Trump.

— Ben Domenech

This week’s featured posts are “How Republicans Trumped Themselves” and “The Leadership We Need“.

This week everybody was trying to figure out what to do about Donald Trump

In “How Republicans Trumped Themselves” I pull together a chorus of voices that diagnose the Trump phenomenon as a symptom of a larger ill: The GOP has been pandering to bigotry for decades, and conservative media has created a safe zone for every kind of conspiracy theory, no matter how poorly grounded in reality it might be. Now that bigotry and that disregard of facts is being used against them.

In “The Leadership We Need” I take a more abstract look at leadership, and describe how to tell a Leader from a Demagogue.

---

Meanwhile, this guy knows how he wants to respond.

---

In “How Republicans Trumped Themselves“, I briefly quoted Heather Hogan’s article “This is How Fox News Brainwashes Its Viewers“. That article examines the complete Fox propaganda cycle and deserves to be read end-to-end.

and the Paris climate agreement

Grist does a good balancing of the good and bad.

The COP21 conference brought every country to the table, they all accepted the science of climate change, and they agreed to work together to do something about it. But some proved more ambitious than others, and the rich countries didn’t come up with enough money to get the best deal possible.

The bottom line is that the agreement gets us far closer to containing climate change than we were two weeks ago, but still far short of where we need to go. In fact, we won’t even know for years what it will accomplish. How much the agreement reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and through that reduces warming, will depend on whether countries meet their targets for curbing emissions and deploying renewable energy and whether they ramp up their ambition in the years ahead.

and the aftermath of mass shootings

Here’s what we now know about the San Bernardino shooting. 14 people were killed and 22 injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who were killed in a subsequent shootout with police. In the attack they used two semi-automatic rifles, two semi-automatic pistols, and an “explosive device”.

The weapons were acquired legally by Farook and his friend and next-door neighbor, Enrique Marquez. They were illegally modified to accept larger magazines. Farook took out a $28K loan two weeks before the attack, which may have been used to buy guns, ammunition, and other supplies for the attack.

Farook was born in the United States. He was a Sunni Muslim who traveled to Saudi Arabia more than once. In 2014 he met Malik there, and she came to the U.S. under a fiancé visa. While they appear to have had online contact with terrorist groups, so far there’s no indication that they actively belonged to a larger cell, or that anyone (with the possible exception of Marquez) helped them plan or finance their attack.

Apparently, they were both already “radicalized” when they met. Farook attended a mosque, but stopped going there a few weeks before the attack, so it seems unlikely that somebody there whipped him up to do this. There is no evidence that anybody else at the mosque was involved.

In short, San Bernardino does not seem to be an example of the kind of thing we’re being told to fear, and wouldn’t have been prevented by the anti-Muslim proposals we’re hearing: The attackers weren’t infiltrated into the U.S. by ISIS, they weren’t recruited at a mosque, and it’s not even clear that keeping Malik from entering the country would have prevented Farook from launching an attack.

To me, Farook and Malik look a lot like Robert Lewis Dear, the Planned Parenthood shooter, or Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter. None of them seem to have been agents of a larger conspiracy, but they are all examples of what can happen when unstable people believe the kind of hateful, irresponsible rhetoric that is so easy to find these days, and then easily acquire deadly weapons.

To me it barely matters which crazy set of beliefs your violence arises from, whether it’s that ISIS is the proper political heir to Muhammad, that the white race is facing a battle for its survival, or that Planned Parenthood is dismembering babies for profit. As responsible people, we should be trying to prevent all crazy ideologies from inspiring violence.

Amanda Marcotte put it well:

Liberals understand that there are theological and political differences between the different kinds of radical fundamentalism that lead to terrorism, but we are keenly aware that people who pick up a gun in the name of God have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us.

---

The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper discovers that becoming an effective good guy with a gun is harder than it looks.

---

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed the first planeload of the 25,000 Syrian refugees he has promised to take in by the end of February. So Canada, a country with a fraction of our population, is taking in 2 1/2 times as many refugees.

But I’m sure that when the Canadian experiment goes smoothly, and none of their refugees gets involved in terrorist attacks, American conservatives will see the err of their ways and happily increase the number of Syrians we’re giving refuge to. Won’t they?

and Islam

For some reason, this year I haven’t gotten around to writing all the book reviews I planned. So as a down payment on a longer post, I’ll leave you with two quotes from recent books about Islam. Both books portray Islam as more diverse and more flexible than is commonly imagined by the American media.

From Michael Muhammad Knight’s Why I Am a Salafi:

A text’s repeatability in part depends on the potential for its old words to produce new results. A verse remains powerful not because it imposes its meaning on the future, but because it accommodates the future’s needs: The verse is not bound to its author or its first audience.

From Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam?:

Some years ago, I attended a dinner at Princeton University where I witnessed a revealing exchange between an eminent European philosopher who was visiting from Cambridge, and a Muslim scholar who was seated next to him. The Muslim colleague was indulging in a glass of wine. Evidently troubled by this, the distinguished don eventually asked his dining companion if he might be so bold as to venture a personal question: “Do you consider yourself a Muslim?” “Yes,” came the reply. “How come, then, you are drinking wine?” The Muslim colleague smiled gently. “My family have been Muslims for a thousand years,” he said, “during which time we have always been drinking wine.” An expression of distress appeared on the learned logician’s pale countenance, prompting the further clarification: “You see, we are Muslim wine drinkers.” The questioner looked bewildered. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Yes, I know,” replied his native informant, “but I do.”

and Peanuts

Marking the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas, how the whole thing came to be, including a certain amount of the spiritual journey of Charles Schulz.

---

An attempt to enlist the Peanuts characters in the War on Christmas yielded some pushback.

---

I’m not the only one who’s been making the analogy between guns and security blankets.

and you might also be interested in

On a blog he shares with his son, Sift reader Bill Camarda recently posted a piece he called “My America“, in which he presented a personal, positive vision of what America has been and could become. My point in mentioning it is not so much that this particular post should go viral, as that the idea behind should: What if people all over the country started writing their own “My America” and posting it to whatever blog, Facebook page, or other outlet they had access to? That might be a constructive response to the bigotry and hatefulness that seems to be running so wild these days — more constructive than wringing our hands and saying “Isn’t what Trump just said awful?”

I’m not sure what mine would say, but I’m thinking about it.

---

We’re not quite at the point of a government shutdown yet, but the agreement to prevent one is proving hard to work out.

---

Jon Stewart came back to The Daily Show briefly to try to shame Congress into taking care of the 9-11 first responders.

---

The irony of global interdependence:

Russian production of T-shirts with anti-Turkish slogans has been delayed by disruptions in fabric imports from Turkey, Russian media reports said Wednesday.

---

President Obama’s reluctance to plunge deeper into the Syrian mess looks a lot better when you compare him to less cautious leaders, like Putin. Knowing when not to act is as big a part of leadership as knowing what to do.

and let’s close with some fascinating possibilities

Up until now, attempts to replace meat with vegetable products have ranged from unsatisfying to downright awful. But here are two attempts to attack the problem on a deeper level. First meat

and then eggs.

In either case, the point isn’t to do away with animal products. But what if the number of situations where doing without them feels like a hardship got much smaller? That could make a huge difference in both public health and the environment.

If we think that we can only identify the rise of fascism by the arrival of its mature form — the goosestepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies — then it will be far too late. Fascism sprang up in fact as a much more atomized phenomenon, arising at first mostly in rural areas and then spreading to the cities; and if we are to look at those origins, then it’s clear that similar movements can already be seen to exist in America.

— David Neiwert
Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism (2003)

This week’s featured post is “The Political F-word: When and how should we talk about fascism?“

This week everybody was talking terrorist attacks in America

but most people haven’t been calling them that. There were two major ones: the gunman who killed three at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, and the shooting of Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Minneapolis.

It took a while for Republican candidates to figure out how to respond to the Planned Parenthood attack, and most seemed to come to the same conclusion: profess ignorance about how something like this could happen. Mike Huckabee called it “absolutely unfathomable” and a John Kasich tweet described it as a “tragedy” and “senseless”.

But the attack is totally fathomable and makes perfect sense: If you believe the outrageous lies Republicans have been promoting about Planned Parenthood, that it encourages abortions so that it can profit from selling fetal organs, and if you believe that the government — even the Republican majority in Congress — is either unwilling or incapable of stopping this horror, then it’s downright logical that individuals will step up and try to stop it themselves. We don’t have a full manifesto from the attacker yet, but somebody in law enforcement quotes him as saying “no more baby parts“.

Mother Jones points out that this is part of a trend of increased violence since the release of the doctored videos at the center of the baby-part-profiteering lie.

In the four months following the release of the videos, there have been at least four suspected arsons that targeted abortion clinics, compared with just one in all of 2014 and none in 2013. There have been at least five cases of vandalism since August. In comparison, there were 12 total cases of clinic vandalism in all of 2014 and just five cases in 2013, according to federation figures.

---

Last Monday, white supremacists wearing masks and bulletproof vests taunted BLM demonstrators protesting the killing of Jamar Clark by police, and when organizers tried to herd them away, they opened fire.

Again, how do such things happen? They’re not senseless; they make perfect sense inside the alternative reality of the conservative bubble: If BLM really did advocate assassinating policemen, if the racism they protest were imaginary or just an excuse for lawlessness, if they were the real racists themselves, and if the Powers That Be seemed either unable or unwilling to take action against them … well, shouldn’t ordinary citizens be trying to do something about that if they can?

You can’t promote a false image so offensive that it seems to call for a violent response, and then be amazed when someone responds with violence.

---

Having linked to all that poisonous propaganda, I have to post an antidote. Or two.

---

Ted Cruz’ response to the Planned Parenthood shooting is off the scale: He is spreading the idea that the shooter is a “transgendered leftist activist” — based on more-or-less nothing.

---

It’s fascinating to watch anti-abortion activists be outraged that anyone could connect them to the shooter. He’s a lone wolf, they claim, so they shouldn’t have to answer for him. But how many of them will show that kind of consideration to Muslims?

and a Chicago cop charged with murder

A white police officer was charged with murdering a 17-year-old black male, Laquan McDonald, 13 months after the event. A dashcam video shows that the teen-ager had a knife, but made no threatening moves with it. The officer shot him 16 times, including several shots in the back, in full view of several other officers. The arrest was made almost simultaneously with the release of the video, which the police department had kept secret until ordered by a judge to release it. The city had previously paid a $5 million settlement to the family, but had not fired the officer.

The Chicago Police tried to cover up the murder, and would have succeeded if a whistleblower had not tipped off local reporters that the police report did not match the autopsy. No witness statements were taken on the scene, the security footage from a nearby Burger King was erased, and the official report said that McDonald had been shot once in the chest after lunging at the officer. ThinkProgress comments:

Today, even with the official story of McDonald’s death in tatters, city officials appear eager to limit the blame to Van Dyke. “One individual needs to be help accountable,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said on a conference call with community leaders Monday.

Once Van Dyke is prosecuted, the mayor said, “we can go as a city and begin the process of healing.” That process seems unlikely to include accountability for Van Dyke’s colleagues who abetted the official story about why and how he killed McDonald.

We can only wonder how many previous murders Chicago police have swept under the rug, murders in which there was no video, or no one told the press about the cover-up.

---

In late October, the minister at my church preached an amazing sermon. In 1988, while serving in a different town, he witnessed local police killing an unarmed young black man. As white citizens did in those days, he assumed it was justified and put it out of his mind, to the point that until recently he barely remembered at all. When the Black Lives Matter movement started, he began looking back and wondering: What exactly did I see? Who was that young man? Was his death necessary? And why didn’t any of these questions occur to me before? [The YouTube is of the entire service; the sermon begins at the 34 minute mark.]

but hardly anybody was talking about this

Someday we may look back on November 11 as a negative milestone: The last day that the CO2 measurement at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii was below 400 ppm.

Unlike global temperature, global CO2 levels don’t bounce around that much: There’s a yearly cycle, but every year the measurements are higher than the year before. (The cycle bottoms out at the peak of the northern growing season, when plants have absorbed as much CO2 as they’re going to. Mauna Loa, being high and remote, is a good proxy for a global CO2 measure.)

It made news back in 2013 when Mauna Loa’s CO2 measurement went over 400 ppm for the first time, but it only stayed there a few days. Each year the period of 400+ measurements has increased. In the last cycle, it went above 400 ppm in February and stayed there until July.

It crossed 400 ppm again on November 12, maybe for good this time.

and you might also be interested in

The Washington NFL team didn’t grasp that some people might be offended by this tweet (which appears to have been deleted since people started linking to it).

---

Interesting side-effect of the well-publicized trend of young people distancing themselves from organized religion: They’re also much more likely to accept the theory of evolution.

and let’s close with something wonderful

If you just want to spend some time staring and being amazed, check out the National Geographic Photo Contest, which includes this image:

 

Without knowing exactly why ISIS undertook these attacks, we risk dancing to their tune.

— Will McCants

This week’s featured post is “A Meditation on Terrorism“.

This week everybody was talking about the Paris attacks

As I’ve said many times, a one-man blog is poorly equipped to cover breaking news. If you want to keep track of what is known, but avoid the TV networks’ often-baseless speculations and obsessive focus on the most recently revealed detail (which may turns out to be false two days later), I recommend rechecking the Wikipedia article from time to time. As new facts are established and old ones debunked, the article is updated to retell the story as currently understood.

The larger question, though, is how we should respond to attacks like this. My basic take on terrorism hasn’t changed since 2004, when I wrote one of my first popular blog posts “Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz“, which I updated on its 10th anniversary with “Terrorist Strategy 101: a review“. I believe you shouldn’t view a terrorist attack through the same lens as military attacks, because the intention of the attacker is completely different.

The point of a military attack is to degrade a country’s ability to defend itself; by destroying something of military value, the attack is an end in itself. But the point of a terrorist attack is to provoke a response. So responding out of either fear or anger might be exactly what the enemy wants.

One advantage neo-cons have had since 9-11 is that they always have their frame well prepared: Every enemy is Hitler in 1938, and every response other than all-out war is Chamberlain betraying Czechoslovakia at Munich. The whole frame is already sitting in everybody’s head, and it leaps to mind the instant a neo-con uses one of its code words, like appeasement. The instant the frame is invoked, the favored response is obvious: Do whatever it takes to stop the Hitler-analog now, before he gets more powerful later.

That’s a really bad frame for thinking about ISIS. A few thousand jihadis in the Syrian desert don’t bear much resemblance to the nation of Germany, and less than a dozen guys in Paris with AK-47s and grenades are not General Guderian’s panzer corps. But a bad frame will win out against no frame, so we need to present a better way of thinking about this. That’s what I try to lay out in the extended analogy of “A Mediation on Terrorism“.

---

People always ask, “If Muslims don’t approve of terrorist attacks, why aren’t they saying so?” They are. Here are a bunch and here are a bunch more. It’s hard to miss them, if you want to see them. If you don’t want to see them, though, they’re invisible.

---

I haven’t vetted CaspianReport to any depth. It seems to be the work of one very dedicated guy, which makes me identify with him. But I’m not sure who he is or how he views his mission, so I’m not giving my full endorsement yet. But these two videos — one on the origins of ISIS and the other on terrorism in general seem very insightful.

And man, do I envy that logo.

 

and red coffee cups

Segueing from the serious to the ridiculous, I spent a chunk of Thursday morning trying to figure out whether the Christian outrage over Starbucks’ seasonal red coffee cups is a real thing. I don’t believe it is.

I mean, the red cups are real, and they are kind of minimalistic as holiday decorations go: just red with a green logo, rather than including a bunch of secular seasonal images of candy canes and snowmen and such, as Starbucks holiday cups usually do. But I kept feeling like I was being punked: I heard a lot more from people outraged at the ridiculous triviality of the Christian outrage than I heard from actual outraged Christians.

I think that was the point. It all started with an online rant posted by Joshua Feuerstein, a guy whose sole claim to fame is that he posts evangelistic rants. He’s not the leader of any face-to-face religious group. He has an online following, but it’s not clear how many of them are Christians who agree with him, as opposed to secularists who watch his stuff because his antics amuse them, aggravate them, or bolster their sense of superiority. So if he made you look, he won, and the joke was on you. (Correction: us.)

In my opinion, an even bigger joke was on the people who got counter-trolled: the Christians so upset to see people criticizing other Christians that they felt obligated to join in the original complaint, even though they never would have noticed or felt offended by the cups on their own. And then there were the people trying to pander to such people, like Donald Trump. (Loser!)

And the big winner? Starbucks, who dominated the national discussion for a day or two with no advertising expense. CNBC predicts they’ll wait a decent interval, release a cup with more traditional winter themes, and benefit from another huge wave of free publicity. (See the closing for another suggestion.)

and campus protests

By drawing the football team (and implicitly, its coach — not to mention the support of nine deans) into their protests, black activists at the University of Missouri managed to get the resignations of the university president and chancellor.

It’s kind of amazing how negatively this — and similar protests at Yale and elsewhere — have been covered. The gist of the complaint is that the university has tolerated a hostile environment for black students and faculty, in which they’re subject to racial insults and symbolic terrorism (like a swastika being drawn in human feces on a residence hall wall). No one is claiming that the administration has been actively against blacks, but it has showed no sign of regarding the hostile atmosphere as a big deal. Low points were when the president refused to talk to protesters that blocked his car during the homecoming parade, and when he defined systemic oppression by referring to what black students believe rather than anything real.

The black students have been widely characterized as whiny opponents of free speech, and yes, it’s true that Jackie Robinson and other civil-rights trailblazers endured far worse. But is that really the right standard? In 2015, should an African American need to be a Jackie Robinson to make it through a state university?

I’m also not buying the threat to free speech, or that our campuses are places where “political correctness” has run amok. (I stand by my definition of political correctness: “The bizarre liberal belief that whites, men, straights, Christians, the rich, and other Americans in positions of privilege should treat less privileged people with respect, even though such people have no power to force them to.”) As Sally Kohn wrote in The Atlantic:

“Political correctness” only acquired a name when, relatively recently in American history, the idea of treating others respectfully was finally extended to include how white people treat black people, how men treat women, and so on.

The last time Jonathan Chait went off on political correctness, I responded sarcastically:

it’s up to white men (like me and Chait) to decide whether your concerns deserve attention, or if you’re just being too sensitive. We’ll let you know what we decide, but until then try to keep the noise down so that you don’t disturb the neighbors.

I don’t see any reason to reconsider. In reality, campuses are not free speech zones and never have been. They’re more like bars. No bar would post a list of things you can’t talk about. But a good bartender tries to maintain a space where a diverse set of customers feels comfortable, and will not be afraid to tell one customer to tone it down if he’s chasing away some of the others. The University of Missouri — like a lot of American universities — has been doing a bad job of running its bar, when it comes to maintaining a good learning environment for black students. Hopefully it will improve under new management.

and another Republican debate

Until the Paris attack, the quote I was planning to lead with was Trevor Noah‘s:

One thing most pundits agreed on about last night’s Republican debate is that it was it was much better than previous debates, partly due to the fact that it had more substance — which is true, because bullshit is a substance.

I don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll just say that what I outlined in “Three Hours in Bizarro World” still applies: Listening to a Republican presidential debate is like traveling to an alternate universe, one with its own history and facts and arithmetic. For example, it continues to be a place where you can drastically lower taxes, spend more money on the military, not cut any spending that people will notice or miss, and still balance the budget. Similar policies may have led to the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, but the Bush administration was a long time ago and no one remembers it any more.

If anything, Bizarro World has only gotten more bizarre since the candidates revolted against the third debate’s CNBC moderators. So the Fox Business Channel moderators of the fourth debate on Tuesday were careful not to notice when candidates dodged questions or said anything obviously false. They also phrased their questions in conservative NewSpeak, as when Gerard Baker opened a question on inequality with “Many are concerned that the new wealth seems to be going only to innovators and investors” rather than using, say, the equivalent phrase preferred by both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, malefactors of great wealth, or the more pedestrian rich greedy bastards.

But I will point out a few things that are either new or I neglected to mention in previous debate-response posts.

Syria. On Ben Carson’s statement that the Chinese are in Syria, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice says: “unless you’re talking about having a diplomatic presence, I’m not sure what he’s referring to”. I doubt he knows either, though Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams insists Carson’s claim is backed up by “our own intelligence and what Dr. Carson’s been told by people who are on the ground”. So I guess there’s a Carson Intelligence Agency now. Maybe they’re the ones who convinced him the pyramids weren’t built by aliens.

BTW, if the name Armstrong Williams rings a bell, it’s because of his role in the No Child Left Behind payola scandal.

The tax postcard. Ted Cruz managed to work in the two biggest applause lines from his stump speech: simplifying taxes so that you can fill out your return on a postcard, and abolishing the IRS. I’m waiting for a moderator to ask the obvious question: Who do you mail the post card to? Whoever that is, you may not call them the IRS any more, but they are the IRS. And unless they’re going to take your word for how much tax you owe, they’re going to have to behave a lot like the IRS does now.

Cruz’ postcard is worth looking at, because as soon as you picture filling it out, you realize he hasn’t made taxes that much simpler at all.

On line 1, you need to know your investment income, which means you’ll need to know the basis price of any investment you sold. And if you got dividends or interest payments, you’ll need to know what part represented a return of capital, and so on. Unless you expect the government to take your word about all this, you’ll have to be able to show your calculations if challenged. I’d suggest you retain the old Schedules B and D and fill them out just for your own records. And if part of your income is from self-employment, that’s going to be a whole different form with its own complexities.

Line 4 asks about your itemized deductions, which means you’ll have to understand how those are defined. Line 6 lets you deduct for a “savings plan”, so you’ll need to know which plans qualify and how much you’re allowed to deduct. Line 10 retains a tax credit for earned income and child care, so you’ll have to know whether you qualify for those and how to claim them.

In other words, if you have only the wage income reported on your W-2, and you take the standard deduction and don’t mess with the savings program or claim any tax credits, your taxes will be simple. But in that case, they’re simple now: the 1040-EZ form isn’t much bigger than Cruz’ postcard.

Line 9 is the only place where the flatness of Cruz’ tax makes a difference: you figure your tax by multiplying your taxable income (line 8) times 10%. But if he kept the progressive tax rates we have now, Line 9 could say “Look up your tax on the tax tables.” So the flat tax saves you maybe thirty seconds or so, at the cost of blowing a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year federal budget.

The three-page tax code. Related to Cruz’ postcard is Carly Fiorina’s “three-page tax code”. Fiorina is endorsing what is known as a Hall-Rabushka flat tax, named after the two economists who wrote a book describing it. CNN Money notes that the Hall-Rabushka tax code is kept short by using vague terms that would require “hundreds of pages of regulations” to define rigorously.

For instance, there might need to be more clarity around notoriously confusing areas of income and expenses, such as that for the self-employed. Where’s the dividing line between personal expenses and business expenses?

“Taxpayers want to claim all sorts of costs as deductible business expenses, and a lot of [today’s] rules are aimed at limiting such abuse. When is use of a car business or personal? What about meals? Can you hire your kid and pay her $100,000 for services rendered?” Burman said.

The complexity of the current tax code isn’t due to the perversity of the IRS, but to the ingenious justifications people dream up for not paying taxes. If taxes are going to be anything more than a voluntary pass-the-hat system, we’ll continue needing rules to disallow those schemes, even during a Fiorina administration.

The Fed. Rand Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for income inequality:

By artificially keeping interest rates below the market rate, average ordinary citizens have a tough time earning interest.

Yep, if only the people who are falling out of the middle class could get a higher interest rate on all that money they have in the bank, we’d have our inequality problem whipped. Paul also blamed the Fed for high inflation — which is only happening in his imagination — and claimed that  people making $20,000 a year are hurt worst by it. In the real world, the lowest inequality in American history was in the 1970s, when the annual inflation rate sometimes topped 10%.

Ads for Hillary. After Donald Trump called for a “deportation force” to track down and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants, and cited Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback as a precedent that proves it can be done, Jeb Bush observed “they’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now” — which the Clinton campaign verified via Twitter.

Another Clinton high-five moment came when Trump and Carson both opposed raising the minimum wage. Trump cited “wages too high” as a factor making the U.S. non-competitive. (In addition to his general insensitivity, Trump is ignoring all those minimum-wage jobs that aren’t subject to foreign competition. I mean, I’m not going to Cambodia for an Egg McMuffin, even if they’re cheaper there. And no matter how little Honduran janitors earn, nobody’s going to ship a building to Tegucigalpa for cleaning.) And Carson echoed that black teen-agers are unemployed “because of those high wages”.

So if you’re making the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, the Republican front-runners think your wage is high.

and you also might be interested in …

There was a Democratic debate in Iowa Saturday night. I haven’t had time to watch it yet myself. (One debate a week is about my limit.) According to most reports, both Sanders and O’Malley were more aggressive in attacking Clinton, though no one is reporting a serious knockdown moment.

If you thought O’Malley was angling for a VP slot with Clinton, he pretty well eliminated that possibility. If he were Clinton’s VP,  his assessment of the Obama/Clinton foreign policy would be in every Republican attack ad: “Libya is a mess. Syria is a mess. Iraq is a mess. Afghanistan is a mess.”

---

If you want to understand why it’s important to affirm that black lives matter, consider these two articles: Liam O’Ceallaigh looks at the bloody career of Belgium’s King Leopold II in “When You Kill Ten Million Africans, You Aren’t Called ‘Hitler’.” Nobody gets out of high school without hearing about the Holocaust, and you probably have at least some vague knowledge of the killing fields of Cambodia or the Armenian genocide. But Leopold’s genocide against the Congolese goes pretty much unnoticed. He is seldom mentioned among the great monsters of history, because, well, he just killed black people, and they don’t really count.

Now check out the Wikipedia article on the terrorist attack in Kenya in April. In terms of the number of deaths, it was similar to this week’s attacks in Paris. But even I have a reaction of “Oh yeah. I sort of remember that.” We can tell ourselves that all lives matter, but they don’t. Not really, not even among people like me. We’ve all got work to do.

---

I’ve given up on the fantasy of reading the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and making up my own mind. 3000 pages makes it a very boring equivalent of the entire Harry Potter series. So mostly I’m going to be relying on sources I trust on the various issues TPP affects.

So far that’s not looking good for the TPP. Here’s Grist‘s take on the environmental section.

and let’s close with something subtle

Flashing back to the most virulent-but-trivial controversy on the internet this year, here’s the cleverest response I’ve seen to the Starbucks-Christmas-cup flap: “Starbucks releases new White and Gold cups in hopes of offending less people.”

[Chess Grandmaster Aron] Nimzowitsch … once missed first prize in a tournament in Berlin by losing to Sämisch, and when it became clear he was going to lose the game, Nimzowitsch stood up on the table and shouted, “Gegen diesen Idioten muss ich verlieren!” (‘That I should lose to this idiot!”)

— Chess Review (1950), quoted by Wikipedia

I’ve about had it with these people. … We’ve got one candidate that says that we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. Have you ever heard of anything as crazy as that? … We’ve got one person saying we ought to have a 10% flat tax that’ll drive up the deficit in this country by trillions of dollars. … We’ve got one guy that says we ought to take 10 or 11 million people … and pick them up and take them to the border and scream at them to get out of our country. That’s just crazy! … We’ve got people proposing health care reform that’s going to leave, I believe, millions of people without adequate health insurance. What has happened to our party? What has happened to the conservative movement?

— John Kasich, 10-27-2015

Ben Carson 26%, Donald Trump 22% … John Kasich 4%

— CBS/NYT poll, 10-27-2015

This week’s featured article is my attempt to explain Black Lives Matter to conservative Christians. It’s called “Samaritan Lives Matter“.

For months, July’s post “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to be a Bigot” has been asymptotically approaching 100,000 views. (Every week I’ve thought, “Two more weeks at this rate and it’ll get there.”) Well, it finally made it this morning. It’s the Sift’s third 100K post.

This week everybody was talking about Obama sending troops to Syria

So far he’s not talking big numbers: less than 50, with a mission to “assist” groups fighting against ISIS and call in air strikes. I have four problems with this.

First, I haven’t heard any explanation of exactly what the 50 are supposed to accomplish and why 50 is the right number to achieve that purpose. And that makes me wonder if in a month or two we’ll need 100 or 500 troops to do something equally vague. DefenseOne describes

the beginning of this new strategy in the war against [ISIS], which will focus in Iraq on helping security forces retake Ramadi and Bayji and then eventually Mosul. In Syria, the immediate objective is to take and ultimately hold ISIS’s self-declared capital of Raqqa.

But what the final we-can-leave-now objective is, I have no idea.

Second, you know ISIS will put a high priority on capturing a few of those Americans and beheading them on YouTube. And you know what will happen then: Americans back home will start clamoring to “get the bastards”, and it will be hard to resist mounting a full-scale invasion. Weirdly, that’s what ISIS wants: It has an apocalyptic vision, and the apocalypse won’t be complete until an American army arrives.

Third, I’m not sure who or what we’re fighting for. I know ISIS is bad. The Assad regime is also bad, but maybe not as threatening to us or our regional allies as ISIS. Iran and Russia and Hezbollah are helping Assad, and we’re happy about that when they attack ISIS, but not so happy when they attack other Syrian rebels. But even calling them “other Syrian rebels” makes the situation sound less chaotic than it is. Another DefenseOne article claims:

By one count from 2013, 13 “major” rebel groups were operating in Syria; counting smaller ones, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency puts the number of groups at 1,200.

Finally, Congress needs to authorize this. I know the Republican leadership doesn’t want any responsibility for either endorsing or stopping Obama’s moves against ISIS. But they’re Congress, damn it. They do have responsibility, whether they want it or not. The country needs the kind of intelligent debate that we had before the Gulf War in 1991.

and the budget deal

John Boehner kept his promise: He got Paul Ryan elected Speaker, and “cleaned the barn” before Ryan picked up the gavel. The debt limit is suspended until March, 2017, and a new budget deal circumvents the sequester agreement of 2011 to increase both military and domestic spending. Rather than Boehner’s barn-cleaning phrase, I would call it “releasing the hostages”. I’m sure Tea Partiers will try to find something else they can shut down the government over, but for now it looks like we will avoid such artificial crises for a while.

---

Paul Ryan has promised to re-impose the Hastert Rule, which says that the Speaker won’t bring a bill to the floor unless a majority of the Republican caucus supports it. Since there are 247 Republicans in the 435-member House, that means that 124 Republicans — less than 30% of the total House — can block any legislation. If Speaker Boehner had stuck to the Hastert Rule, the United States would be hitting its debt ceiling on Thursday, unleashing chaos in the global economy.

Here’s what the Hastert Rule should mean to American voters: If you don’t like the positions taken by most Republican congressmen, you should vote against the Republican in your district even if your local Republican candidate sounds reasonable. If your representative isn’t in “the majority of the majority”, his or her vote isn’t going to count for much, other than to empower the more conservative Republicans who dominate the caucus.

and the third Republican debate

The thing to know about the third Republican debate [held Wednesday; here’s the video and transcript] was that the candidates didn’t debate each other, they debated the moderators and rebelled against the whole concept of facts or accountability. As in the second debate, the biggest applause came whenever a candidate clearly and boldly stated something that isn’t true. (NowThis News made a video collecting some of the biggest lies.)

Slate’s Jamelle Bouie:

The problem isn’t that CNBC engaged in “gotcha” questions meant to “embarrass” the Republican candidates. It’s that any serious look is a fatal blow to GOP plans and proposals, which don’t deliver on promised substance. Trump can’t deport millions of immigrants; Carson can’t raise enough revenue to fund the federal government; and the “middle-class” tax plans of Bush, Rubio, and others shower most of their benefits on the rich. And as long as this is true, GOP candidates will have a hard time with all but the most friendly moderators.

and William Saletan:

What happened in this debate wasn’t an attack by the press on the candidates. It was an attack by the candidates on the press. Harwood, Quick, and the other CNBC panelists were no harsher to the Republicans on Wednesday than CNN’s Anderson Cooper was to Clinton and other Democrats in their debate two weeks ago. What was different this time was the reaction. Presented with facts and figures that didn’t fit their story, the leading Republican candidates accused the moderators of malice and deceit.

and Ezra Klein:

the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks — but that’s because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.

Here’s the strangest thing about the objections to the “liberal media” in this debate: If you’ve ever watched CNBC, you know that it isn’t liberal. Its target audience is the investing class, and it panders to them the same way that the Food Channel panders to foodies. In fact, the event usually cited as the beginning of the Tea Party was a Rick Santelli rant on CNBC in 2009. Santelli was one of the questioners Wednesday night. Not even Ann Coulter was buying that CNBC asked more hostile questions than Fox News did in the first debate.

What about Ted Cruz’ claim that the Democrats got softball questions in their debate? Nope.

---

A few of the other falsehoods in the debate deserve special attention. Chris Christie’s claims about Social Security were outrageous. First:

The government has lied to you and they have stolen from you. They told you that your Social Security money is in a trust fund. All that’s in that trust fund is a pile of IOUs for money they spent on something else a long time ago.

What he means by “a pile of IOUs” is that the Social Security Trust Fund has invested its money in Treasury bonds. If a private pension fund did that, the only complaint auditors might make is that it is too conservative an investment strategy. If your IRA contains government bonds, or mutual funds that own government bonds, you also are basing your retirement plans on “a pile of IOUs”.

And then he said:

Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years.

That claim is entirely baseless. The WaPo fact-checker: “Christie loves to say this but that doesn’t make it true.” The Social Security Trustees Report says:

Interest income and redemption of trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual aggregate cash-flow deficits until 2034.

Candidates should be talking about what happens after 2034, but that’s no excuse for Christie’s scaremongering.

---

Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with the shady nutritional-supplement company Mannatech, which has claimed its products can cure autism and cancer. He said

I didn’t have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda.

Jim Geraghty of National Review — usually considered a key part of the conservative media — recounted the Carson’s history with Mannatech and commented:

Carson’s lack of due diligence before working with the company is forgivable. His blatant lying about it now is much harder to forgive.

---

The only “lie” the candidates wanted to discuss, though, was what Hillary Clinton said about Benghazi in 2012. Marco Rubio launched this attack:

Democrats have the ultimate SuperPac. It’s called the mainstream media. … Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee. She admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying, “Hey, this attack at Benghazi was caused by Al Qaida-like elements.” She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the week she got exposed as a liar.

The truth, which is well known, is that while Clinton did offer different explanations of the Benghazi attack during that first week, she was also getting a changing story from intelligence sources. If you dislike her, you can decide to interpret those facts as her lying, but her “fog of war” explanation also fits the facts.

I’m puzzled by why Republicans see the possibility that Clinton might have lied as a moral disqualification, while Carson’s Mannatech lie, or Christie’s Social Security lie, or Carly Fiorina’s claim to have watched a non-existent Planned Parenthood video (among other liberties she takes with the truth) aren’t.

---

The root problem here is discussed in Mike Lofgren’s “GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge“.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact.

Ted Cruz solution to the debate “problem” is to take Republican debates entirely into the conservative news bubble. He’d like to see Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin moderate.

and meat

I had a hard time finding a good article about the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s classification of processed meat as a “definite” cause of cancer and red meat as a “probable” cause. Lots of news sources sensationalized the story, like The Guardian‘s headline: Processed meats pose same cancer risk as smoking and asbestos, reports say.

Well, not exactly. The Cancer Research UK blog did much better.

As Professor Phillips explains, “IARC does ‘hazard identification’, not ‘risk assessment’. That sounds quite technical, but what it means is that IARC isn’t in the business of telling us how potent something is in causing cancer – only whether it does so or not.”

So, yes, bacon and sausage are now in the same definite-cause category as tobacco, but that doesn’t mean that Egg McMuffins are as dangerous as cigarettes. Cancer Research UK quantifies using a 2011 study from the World Cancer Research Fund:

We know that, out of every 1000 people in the UK, about 61 will develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives. Those who eat the lowest amount of processed meat are likely to have a lower lifetime risk than the rest of the population (about 56 cases per 1000 low meat-eaters).

If this is correct, the WCRF’s analysis suggests that, among 1000 people who eat the most processed meat, you’d expect 66 to develop bowel cancer at some point in their lives – 10 more than the group who eat the least processed meat.

If nobody smoked, the article estimates, there would be 64,500 fewer cancers per year in the United Kingdom. If nobody ate processed meat, 8,800 fewer cancers.

The upshot isn’t that you should swear off hot dogs forever, but that if you eat a lot of them, you’d probably be healthier if you cut down. But you knew that already.

---

For balance, I have to link to this: “World Health Organization Warns that Consumption of Kale Leads to Arrogance“.

A spokesperson for the WHO told The (un)Australian: “These findings though alarming are not surprising, I mean we’ve all been at a dinner party and had to endure the whining of a vegetarian or worse a vegan, talking about how superior they are to us carnivores. Until recently they merely whined, now with the introduction of kale and to a lesser extent quinoa their whining is now more boastful and confrontational.

and more police abuse

You’ve probably already seen the video: A police officer assigned to a South Carolina high school was called into a classroom to address what sounds like a fairly ordinary discipline problem. The teacher had asked a 15-year-old black girl to leave the class, and she wasn’t going. When she also refused to cooperate with the cop, he flipped her desk over and threw her across the room. The student seems not to have posed any danger to the cop, the teacher, or any of the students.

The incident opened a larger debate on the role of “resource officers” assigned to schools. Originally, the idea was to humanize students’ image of cops, but more and more they are being used to criminalize problems schools used to deal with in less confrontational ways.

South Carolina — often a trail-blazer in bizarre laws — has a law against “disturbing school”. The first time I read it, I thought it was outlawing adults coming onto school property and making problems, which I guess it does. But apparently it applies to students too, who can be arrested for such vague things as “to act in an obnoxious manner” at school. (As I remember high school, I think we all could have been arrested for that at one time or another.)

As we saw in the recent it’s-a-clock-not-a-bomb case, vague laws create openings for the unconscious prejudices of authorities, especially racial prejudices. One student carrying a baseball bat through the halls might look like he’s taking a short cut to the playing field, while another — doing exactly the same thing — might look like a threat. One kid caught somewhere he shouldn’t be looks lost, while another is interpreted as a criminal trespasser.

---

In other police-brutality news, NBA player Thebo Sefolosha had his leg broken by New York police in April, just as his Atlanta Hawks were about to enter the playoffs. The incident was caught on video, and the police don’t look good. They charged Sefolosha with three misdemeanors, and apparently prosecutors thought they were being generous when they offered to let Sefolosha off with one day of community service.

He decided to go to trial, and was acquitted after less than an hour of jury deliberation. Now he’s filing suit against the NYPD.

The NYPD had another athlete-related incident in September, when an officer misidentified retired tennis pro James Blake as a member of a fake credit-card ring and arrested him. Blake offered no resistance, but was violently wrestled to the ground anyway. Again, it was caught on video.

I think Stephen Judkins is on to something:

It’s crazy that once personal video recorders became ubiquitous UFOs stopped visiting Earth and cops started brutalizing people all the time.

and you also might be interested in …

There are two kinds of states in America: states that expanded Medicaid, and states that have a lot of uninsured people.

---

Here’s why we need stronger anti-discrimination laws: A Michigan pediatrician refused to treat a six-day-old infant because she had two moms. He apologized in a note, saying: “I felt that I would not be able to develop the personal patient doctor relationship that I normally do with my patients.”

I’m sure that back in the Jim Crow era, a lot of white doctors felt that way about black patients. Some probably still do, but today the law tells them “Get over it.” It should say the same thing to homophobic doctors.

---

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump committed a Republican heresy when he challenged Jeb Bush’s claim that his brother “kept us safe”. (How safe were the three thousand people in the World Trade Center?) Last Monday, The Atlantic‘s Kathy Gilsinan took it a step further in “Is It Really Better That Saddam’s Gone?“, a question I’ve raised on this blog before.

Bad as he was, Saddam was a secular ruler who kept a lid on the Sunni/Shia conflict and religious extremists like the ones who eventually founded ISIS. His Iraq was a strong regional counterweight to Iran. Nobody wants to claim he was a good guy, but in certain ways he was useful. It should go without saying that replacing his repressive order with the current chaos wasn’t worth losing over a trillion dollars, four thousand American soldiers, and countless Iraqis.

---

Here’s how the Benghazi hearings are being spun now. In criticizing House Republicans’ move Tuesday to impeach the IRS commissioner, Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer said:

This is not going to end well. … Republicans in Congress have shown that they have no ability to conduct successful investigations of this administration.

Implicit in this statement is that the Obama administration can never be cleared of a charge. If no wrongdoing is found, the investigation is just “unsuccessful”. Maybe the next investigation will do better.

and let’s close with some uncommon sense

If your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all [for 9/11], how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?”

— CNN reporter Jake Tapper,
interviewing Jeb Bush on Sunday’s State of the Union

This week’s featured post is a book review: “How Propaganda Works by Jason Stanley”.

BTW, I noticed this cartoon just a little too late include it in the propaganda article:

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic debate

I agree with the media consensus on Tuesday night’s debate (transcript, video — you can skip the first 5 minutes): Sanders and Clinton both did well, while the other three candidates’ performances didn’t launch them into contention. (O’Malley looked wooden and at times seemed to be struggling to recall a memorized line. Webb has too many positions that are out of the Democratic mainstream. Chafee didn’t seem ready for prime time.)

In general, focus groups and online polls said Sanders won while pundits thought Hillary did. I think it comes down to the different goals of a front-runner and a challenger: Sanders produced the most memorable moments and put forward Democratic ideals with the most passion. But strategically, Clinton did what she needed to do. (Similarly in the 2012 cycle, Mitt Romney’s debates never wowwed anybody, but he consistently stayed on track to win the nomination.) However they reacted to Sanders, I think most Democratic viewers came out of the debate with fewer doubts about Clinton as a candidate.

(Better designed polls have just started coming out. In CNN’s, most people say Hillary won, and her support remains stable at 45%.)

---

I also agree with the upbeat response liberal pundits had to the debate as a whole: It contrasted well with the two Republican clown shows. The candidates were thoughtful and made substantive responses; they talked about issues — affordable college, an increased minimum wage, family leave, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, shifting the country away from fossil fuels — that mean something in voters’ lives, rather than manufactured issues like Planned Parenthood; nobody had to pretend to take seriously ridiculous proposals like Trump’s Great Wall of Mexico or the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism; Democrats treated each other with respect, while Republicans insulted each other and then argued about whose insults went over the line.

The highlight, which you’ve probably seen by now, was Bernie Sanders’ backhanding of Anderson Cooper’s question on the Clinton emails. The question was directed to Clinton, and after her answer the discussion went like this:

SANDERS: Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the Secretary is right. And that is, that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.

CLINTON: Thank you. Me too. Me too.

SANDERS: The middle class — Anderson, and let me say something about the media as well. I go around the country, talk to a whole lot of people — the middle class of this country is collapsing. We have 27 million people living in poverty. We have massive wealth and income inequality. Our trade policies have cost us millions of decent jobs. The American people want to know whether we’re going to have a democracy or an oligarchy as a result of Citizens United. Enough of the emails. Let’s talk about the real issues facing America.

CLINTON (offering a handshake which Sanders accepts): Thank you, Bernie. Thank you.

I think that exchange helped them both, and helped the Party. Sanders established that he cares more about his message than just gaining advantage wherever he can find it. Clinton accepted his support graciously and didn’t look for a sinister underside. And Sanders’ list of “the real issues facing America” was a good summary of what Democrats around the country hope to run on.

---

Saturday afternoon, Martin O’Malley was speaking at an Irish bar a few blocks from my apartment. He’s much better in front of small groups. In the Q&A he displayed a kind of joyful wonkiness that is hard to imagine in a Republican candidate. The more technical the questions got — FISA courts, sustainable building design, the nitty-gritty of gun control proposals — the happier he seemed. In response to a question on software patents, he said: “You have played ‘Stump the Presidential Candidate’, and you have won.” (O’Malley won all the other rounds.)

I think if you put him alone in a room with Hillary Clinton, they would have the most fascinating conversation and come away totally charmed with each other.

---

Speaking of “the real issues facing America”, the NYT’s Patrick Healy made a great point: The two parties aren’t proposing different solutions to our country’s problems, they disagree about what the problems are.

Climate change, racism, gun violence, student debt, the concentration of wealth, and the domination of our political process by super-rich donors — Republicans just don’t consider those to be problems, and instead worry that we’re being invaded by Mexicans, Planned Parenthood is selling baby organs, the government is on the verge of bankruptcy, rich job-creators are hogtied by taxes and regulations, and welfare is sapping the will of poor people to make it on their own.

The only problem both recognize is the instability in the Middle East. But even there, Republicans are afraid ISIS will take over the world, while Democrats dread being sucked into another military quagmire.

I find Healy’s observation discouraging. People who care about the same problem can usually find a little common ground and build a compromise around it. But it’s hard to work out anything with people who don’t recognize the problem you want to solve.

---

One consistent Republican criticism of the debate has been that the Democratic candidates object to the status quo (inequality, etc.) as if their party hadn’t been in power these last seven years. Two answers:

• To a large extent, Republicans own the status quo. Other than ObamaCare, President Obama hasn’t been able to get his programs through Congress. Most of the big battles have been about Republican attempts to roll back New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and Food Stamps.
• Democratic complaints about income inequality and the destruction of the middle class aren’t protests against Obama’s policies, they’re protests against the wealth-favoring consensus that has dominated American politics since Reagan. That’s when the middle class began shrinking.

---

Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump proposed their own theory about why the Democrats had a civil debate: It was a conspiracy orchestrated by CNN and the Democratic National Committee. “CNN did not hit them like they hit us,” Trump complained. “They didn’t make them fight.”

I’m bemused by the idea that somebody “makes” Trump fight. People with self-control issues often put forward such now-look-what-you-made-me-do excuses. Personal responsibility comes up a lot in conservative rhetoric. But actually taking responsibility for your actions … that’s even tougher than running for president.

---

It’s crazy that Chafee and Webb were in the debate and Lawrence Lessig wasn’t. One reason Lessig didn’t get over the poll threshold is that many polls didn’t list him as an option. Lessig is the leading voice addressing a serious issue — campaign finance — and he should be on the stage next time.

---

I had the same thought as the 538 round table: Hillary’s debate performance lowers the likelihood that Biden gets into the race. As Farai Chideya put it:

It’s awfully hard to ride in to save the day when the day doesn’t seem to need saving.

And Nate Silver added this thought:

the debate did real damage to another bullshit meme, which is linking the Democratic and Republican races together under the same narrative umbrella. The Democrats are quite … arrayed right now. The Republicans aren’t.

and new attacks on Bernie Sanders

You’ll know that Bernie has a real chance to win when Fox News gives him his own Benghazi. I don’t watch a lot of Fox, but I do channel-scan through it regularly. It has looked to me like Fox has been rooting for Sanders because his success undermines Clinton, who they expect to be the nominee. Tearing down Clinton has been Priority #1 on Fox, and still is.

But Republicans might be starting to hedge their bets. Until recently, in my limited sampling, Fox has been giving Sanders credit for being authentic and honest, and hasn’t been ridiculing him the way they would if they took him seriously. But Wednesday night I saw Bill O’Reilly talking to frequent Fox contributor Bernie Goldberg about Sanders’ socialism. O’Reilly offered that if Sanders thinks socialism is so great, he should take a look at Venezuela. (In the debate, Sanders offered Denmark as an example the U.S. could learn from. The difference between Denmark and Venezuela seems lost on O’Reilly.) Goldberg wondered “if his middle name is Che”.

In a radio interview, Rand Paul couldn’t tell the difference between Denmark and the Soviet Union. “Most of the times when socialism has been tried that, uh, attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it. Stalin killed tens of millions of people. Mao killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people.”

AFAIK, neither Bernie nor the Danes have killed anybody for their policy objections … yet. But the thought of Danish gulags reminds me of Eddie Izzard’s cake-or-death routine about militant Anglicans.

---

In the middle of his how-can-you-be-elected question to Sanders, Anderson Cooper said: “You honeymooned in the Soviet Union.” (At home, I said “Whaaaa?”) Turns out, it’s not like it sounds.

In 1956, that noted Communist sympathizer Dwight Eisenhower tried to cool down the Cold War by negotiating an American/Soviet sister-cities program. In 1988, when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, a 12-person trip to its sister (Yaroslavl) was scheduled right after Sanders’ wedding.

So the real story is that Sanders took his wife along on a mayoral business trip in lieu of an actual honeymoon. Not very romantic, maybe, but not scandalous either.

---

I love Bill Maher’s bit on what Republicans hear when Bernie says something.

---

This kind of nonsense begins to test what worries me most about Sanders: his prickly temperament. I’m not sure how he will react if/when he faces relentless unfair criticism like the pseudo-scandals Hillary has been dealing with since 1992. Just because Sanders doesn’t have a Benghazi yet doesn’t mean Fox can’t manufacture one any time it wants. (When Lincoln Chafee bragged that he has never had a scandal in his long political career, I thought: “The Far Right must never have felt threatened by you.”) How he responds will tell us if he has what it takes to win a general election.

and Benghazi

While we’re talking about Hillary’s emails, the House Benghazi Committee continues to lose whatever credibility it may once have had. What House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had previously implied, New York Republican Congressman Richard Hanna admitted directly:

I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.

And a former committee staff member has blown the whistle:

Maj. Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve who describes himself as a conservative Republican, told CNN that the committee trained its sights almost exclusively on Clinton after the revelation last March that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. … Podliska, who as fired after nearly ten months as an investigator for the Republican majority, is now preparing to file a lawsuit against the select committee next month, alleging that he lost his job in part because he resisted pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely on the State Department and Clinton’s role surrounding the Benghazi attack.

In all the attempted defenses of the committee, I have yet to hear a clear statement of what the previous seven Benghazi investigations failed to cover, and what this investigation is doing differently to get to the bottom of whatever-it-is.

---

Hillary testifies before the Benghazi committee Thursday. I suspect the event will resemble the recent testimony of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards to a different committee: Republicans will browbeat her in order to look tough for their base, but Clinton will maintain her composure and look like the winner to most of the country.

and Russian intervention in Syria

An article in Thursday’s NYT portrays Russia’s air base in Latakia and its cruise-missile strikes from the Caspian Sea as testing and showcasing Russia’s recently upgraded military hardware. In other words, it makes Putin in Syria sound like Hitler in Spain.

and Congress

Still no apparent progress towards choosing a speaker. The idea that Paul Ryan would satisfy the right-wingers is falling apart. I’m standing by my analysis from last week.

Mopshell on Daily Kos provides a complete census of the various overlapping far-right groups in the House.

---

Rumor has it that John Boehner will get the debt ceiling raised before he rides into the sunset. But now CNN says Mitch McConnell is making ransom demands:

McConnell is seeking a reduction in cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security recipients and new restrictions on Medicare, including limiting benefits to the rich and raising the eligibility age, several sources said. In addition, the Kentucky Republican is eager to see new policy riders enacted, including reining in the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean water regulations.

This has to be a bluff. I mean, seriously: Crashing into the debt ceiling is unpopular. Cutting Social Security and Medicare is unpopular. Water pollution is unpopular. Pulling them all together isn’t a political proposal, it’s a Bond supervillain plot.

And the justification is that the deficit is out of control? Keep reading.

but nobody was talking about the incredible shrinking federal deficit

Fiscal Year 2015 ended on September 30, so we can total up. The annual deficit is back where it was before the financial collapse that began at the very end of FY 2008 when Lehman Brothers went broke.

Steve Benen comments:

I don’t necessarily consider this sharp reduction in the deficit to be good news. If it were up to me, federal officials would be borrowing more, not less, taking advantage of low interest rates, investing heavily in infrastructure and economic development, creating millions of jobs, and leaving deficit reduction for another day.

That said, if we’re going to have a fiscal debate, it should at least be rooted in reality, not silly misconceptions. And the reality is, we’re witnessing deficit reduction at a truly remarkable clip. Every conservative complaint about fiscal recklessness and irresponsibility in the Obama era is quantifiably ridiculous.

---

BTW: Republicans who want to enlarge Obama’s deficit total usually charge him with the record FY 2009 deficit, which rightfully belongs more to President Bush. (That’s why it’s in red in the graph.) Bush wrote the original FY 2009 budget; his early projections were of a $400 billion deficit, but due to the financial collapse, CBO estimates had risen to $1.2 trillion by the time Obama was inaugurated in January, 2009, eventually finishing over $1.4 trillion. So at worst you can blame Obama for that last $200 billion.

and you also might be interested in …

Yet another good-guy-with-a-gun opened fire on escaping shoplifters in a store parking lot. This time in Indiana. (Last week’s parking-lot shooting was in Michigan.) One more example of guns making us all safer.

---

One thing Trump brings to the Republican race is an occasional voice from outside the bubble. For example, his common-sense observation that Jeb Bush’s claim that his brother “kept us safe” is ridiculous.

When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time. He was president, O.K.?

Not OK, if you’re inside the Republican bubble. Jeb tweeted his response:

How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.

Which is what you do inside the bubble: If challenged, you just repeat the challenged claim and insult the challenger.

ThinkProgress then posted a wonderful satire “Was George W. Bush President On 9/11? An Investigation Into The Controversy Tearing The GOP Apart“. They review and refute the evidence against: Yes, Bush did get fewer votes in 2000 than Al Gore, but we have pictures of him taking the oath of office on January 20, 2001. A calendar proves that January 20 is before September 11. And even though Bush spent the entire month of August on vacation, memoranda — like the “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” presidential brief presented to him — indicate he did continue to be president.

Weighing it all together, TP concludes:

It seems more likely than not that George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001.

---

When Trump started running for president in July, claiming he would finance everything out of his own pocket, I was unconvinced about his willingness to spend money on the scale that a competitive campaign requires:

The kind of money Trump has spent so far — and foregone as business partners run away from him — is a recoverable investment. He’s building the Trump brand, which will net him future earnings in book sales and TV ratings. The campaign — at least the way he’s run it so far — will keep his act fresh for years to come.

By November, though, a serious candidate will have to start putting serious money into Iowa and New Hampshire. Not thousands, millions. TV time on the Boston stations that cover southern New Hampshire is not cheap. The idiosyncratic process of the Iowa caucuses requires a ground game. And if you survive the Iowa/NH/South Carolina winnowing in January and February, you just need more money to compete nationwide in March.

As November approaches, I’m still unconvinced. Politico reports that in the July-September quarter, the Trump campaign had spent just $4 million nationwide, most of it not self-financed by Trump, and much of it spent within the Trump empire.

By contrast Jeb Bush has made a $4.8 million ad buy in New Hampshire. (Believe me, if you watch TV here, you can’t escape him.) It’s not gaining him any ground in the polls, but his outlay marks the start of the big-spending period of the campaign. We’ll soon know whether Trump is serious or just running as a publicity stunt.

---

When conservatives make up a charge that liberals are doing something sinister, probably the claim will eventually justify conservatives doing that very thing. Here’s an example from Ben Carson: Based on the bogus charge that under Obama “the IRS has systematically targeted conservative nonprofit groups for politically motivated audits and harassment,” Carson calls for revoking the tax exemption of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has criticized his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

---

My friend Abby Hafer did a wonderful half-hour explanation of why intelligent design doesn’t explain the human body, but evolution does. (Quick summary: The body is kludgy the way evolved things are, not optimized like designed things.) She has a book on the same subject coming out soon, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer.

---

All the people worrying about Sharia in America might do better to worry about the Christians who want to impose Old Testament law. You’ve probably heard about the folks who want to stone gays to death. But did you know about the ones who want to bring back slavery? On a radio show in Iowa, the host proposed to Mike Huckabee the Old Testament solution for theft:

It says [in Exodus], if a person steals, they have to pay it back two-fold, four-fold. If they don’t have anything, we’re supposed to take them down and sell them. … We indenture them and they have to spend their time not sitting on their stump in a jail cell, they’re supposed to be working off the debt. Wouldn’t that be a better choice?

To his credit, Huckabee’s first reaction was to chuckle at that suggestion. But people on the Right never say “That’s just effing crazy” to each other, so Huckabee answered: “Well, it really would be. … Sometimes the best way to deal with a nonviolent criminal behavior is what you just suggested.”

Offering non-violent offenders a chance to make restitution rather than be punished is actually a progressive idea, known as restorative justice. But forcing convicts to work in jobs mandated by the state has a long, sad history in the United States, as told by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name.

and let’s close with a comment on the season(s)

Maybe it’s a little too soon to start seeing Christmas stuff in the stores.