The Weekly Sift

The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.

— Anonymous (or maybe they just don’t want us to know who said it)

This week’s featured post is “Rating This Week’s Craziness“. It introduces the Weekly Sift’s Crazy Scale, for rating the relative danger posed by the sheer insanity of stories and events that need more than just a debunking.

If you’re wondering what I was up to last week when I didn’t put out a Sift. I was telling a Unitarian Universalist congregation how Universalism provides a religious unification of a bunch of positions that often get dismissed as “politically correct”.

This week everybody was talking about crazy stuff

In addition to the stuff that made it into the featured article, this NYT cartoon summarized a bunch of other crazy-sounding things that are really happening:

and Baltimore

The riots are over and the National Guard is packing up, but Baltimore gave rise to a lot of interesting public discussion (as well as a lot of complete crap).

For one thing, who knew street gangs were this articulate?

The NYT Magazine‘s “Our Demand is Simple: Stop Killing Us” is well worth your time. So is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Clock Didn’t Start With the Riots“, which makes this excellent point:

I read the governor in the New York Times today and he was saying in the paper that—you know, because it’s going to be a big day tomorrow—he was saying “violence will not be tolerated.” And I thought about that as a young man who’s from West Baltimore and grew up in West Baltimore and I thought about how violence was tolerated for all of my life here in West Baltimore. …

I don’t want to come off as if I’m sympathizing or saying that it is necessarily okay, to inflict violence just out of anger, no matter how legitimate that anger is. But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time.

There’s a similar problem with all those columns about how street violence is the wrong way to make the point that police violence against already-subdued black men has got to stop. If we call for communities like Baltimore and Ferguson to quiet down, that’s got to be coupled with a commitment to start listening when they speak in softer voices. Otherwise we’re just saying: “Pipe down to make it easier for me to ignore you.”

Larry Wilmore makes this point humorously but effectively in his “Justice for Tamir Rice” piece. Tamar Rice is the 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park near his home, when Cleveland police rolled up and killed him within seconds, all of which was captured on video. Cleveland has been peacefully waiting for some kind of resolution in this case for five months. With a Comedy Central lawyer standing over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t actually call for violence, Wilmore observes that non-confrontation isn’t getting anything done.

There’s a self-fulfilling pattern here: If violence is the only kind of speech you’ll pay attention to, then sooner or later you’ll get violence.

Finally, there are all the white pundits saying or writing something along the lines of: We elected Obama to make race relations better, and they’ve gotten worse. Elspeth Reeve answers that point in The New Republic with “The White Man’s Bargain“. She starts with an NYT report quoting Republican strategist Rick Wilson:

A number of people “crafted this tacit bargain in their heads,” he said, speaking of Mr. Obama’s election. “This is going to be the end of the ugly parts of racial division in American.”

Reeve then raises this question about the “tacit bargain”:

What is being exchanged? Wilson is probably not saying people thought police would stop killing unarmed black kids because Obama was elected. Perhaps instead he is saying people thought black people would stop getting so mad when it happened. What he means is that people (and, let’s say this right here: white people) are eager to pay off the whole legacy-of-slavery-and-systemic-racism tab, to finally settle up and not have to think about social justice anymore. Wasn’t making a black guy president enough?

She goes through the long history of whites making imaginary bargains, which goes all the way back to slavery. She concludes:

What tacit bargainers have always been asking is: Isn’t there something else we can substitute for true equality? The answer is no.

and new presidential candidates

The big political news since the last Sift is that Bernie Sanders is running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. So Hillary won’t simply be coronated, and somebody will make the case for real liberalism in this cycle.

I’m trying not to make the Sift all-2016 all-the-time, so I won’t get to Bernie’s announcement speech until next week. My snap reaction is that everybody left of Hillary should be happy that the primary campaign will keep her from drifting too far right. Beyond that, I need to decide how far my enthusiasm for Bernie should go: Will I vote for him in the New Hampshire primary? If do, is that because I’m making a statement or because I want him to get the nomination? If he did get nominated, would he stand a chance in the general election against, say, Jeb Bush or Scott Walker? Give me another week to think it through.

On the Republican side, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee all joined the race, which is getting unusually crowded. Rick Santorum announced a date for his announcement: May 27. (I don’t know why he hadn’t previously announced that he was going to announce the date of his announcement. It just came totally out of the blue.)

Again, it will take some time for me to add these candidates to my 2016 speech series. I do have a snap reaction to Carson: I’m not sure he understands his role in the Republican Party, which is to provide cover against accusations of racism, as Herman Cain did in 2012. White audiences can cheer Carson’s aggressive and disrespectful criticisms of President Obama without worrying about being called racists.

But as Obama starts to fade from the scene, that role becomes less important. If Carson wants to stay relevant, he’ll have to move on to providing cover for more general I’m-not-a-racist-but criticisms of the black community. His path forward is to say things about Baltimore that are more extreme than a white candidate can get away with. I’m not sure he realizes he signed up for that.

Fiorina, meanwhile, is well set up to provide the same service for sexist Republicans who need to trash Hillary. She could easily wind up with the VP nomination.

The religious right has Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz to choose from. But in view of the bad advice God has given his family in the past, it’s Jeb Bush who should be pushed to spell out exactly what role God will play in his administration.

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We’re about six weeks from a Supreme Court decision on King v. Burwell, the suit that might make ObamaCare subsidies illegal in about half the country. Congressional Republicans have written in the WaPo “Republicans have a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare” so that millions of people would not instantly lose health insurance.

Unfortunately, only one relatively unimportant committee in the Senate and none in the House have held any public hearings about this plan. As for assembling a coalition in the House to pass it — the kind of thing John Boehner has not been particularly good at — there seems to be no motion at all. HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn says what I’ve been thinking:

the absence of a public effort to match the public rhetoric matters only if Republicans are actually serious about passing a plan. They may not be. Their real goals may be purely cosmetic — to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance and, more immediately, to ease the anxiety of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, either of whom might hesitate to issue a ruling with such potentially devastating consequences to so many people.

Two weeks ago, I told you about a poll that showed how sensitive opinions on abortion are to how the question is phrased. (You get a more pro-life response if you phrase the question in terms of abstract right-and-wrong, and a more pro-choice response if you phrase it in terms of women’s rights.) Wednesday, the NYT’s Upshot blog described how poll results about abortion get less polarized as the questions focus on specific cases: Many people who say that abortion should be “illegal in all cases” will nonetheless say it should be legal if the mother will die. Conversely, many people who say it should be “legal in all cases” still think it should be illegal to abort a healthy fetus ready to be born.

That’s the extreme edge of a more general phenomenon: People who think they are diametrically opposed to each other on abortion often agree on a lot of specific cases. Apparently, much of the polarization centers on what comes to mind when you hear the word abortion. Do you think of a promiscuous woman who couldn’t be bothered to use birth control, and now wants to get rid of a problem-free pregnancy rather than offer a healthy baby to a couple who would give it a good life? Or do you think of woman carrying a child for her rapist, or facing serious health issues?

I think the winning choice-leaning argument goes something like this: Every woman, every family, and every pregnancy is different, so ideally the decision to carry a fetus to term would be made by the people involved, and not by a legislature or a court or a bureaucrat. But the decision to abort becomes more morally weighty the longer the fetus develops, so the law should push women to decide promptly, and demand higher levels of justification for later-term abortions.

Sweden seems to have it about right, in my opinion:

The current legislation is the Abortion Act of 1974 (SFS 1974:595). This states that up until the end of the eighteenth week of the pregnancy the choice of an abortion is entirely up to the woman, for any reason whatsoever. After the 18th a woman needs a permission from the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to have an abortion. Permission for these late abortions is usually granted for cases in which the fetus or mother are unhealthy. Abortion is not allowed if the fetus is viable, which generally means that abortions after the 22nd week are not allowed. However, abortions after the 22nd week may be allowed in the rare cases where the fetus can not survive outside the womb even if it is carried to term.

Wikipedia adds:

The issue is largely settled in Sweden and the question of the legality of abortion is not a highly controversial political issue. … Consensus in Sweden is in favour of preventing unwanted pregnancies by the use of birth control and the primary goal is not to lower the amount of abortions, but rather the goal is that all children that are born should be wanted.

In the Republican-controlled Congress, climate-change denial is a two-step dance:

1. Claim that the science isn’t settled yet, so more research is necessary before we take any action.
2. Defund that research.

and let’s close with something fantastic

like Key & Peele’s musical trip to Negrotown, where you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.

Republicans think I’m too old to be president but not old enough for Social Security.

– a line suggested for Hillary Clinton

This week’s featured posts are “Death, Taxes, and the American Dream” and “The 2016 Stump Speeches: Marco Rubio“.

This week everybody was talking about Social Security

This week Chris Christie walked into one of the most dangerous gaps in politics: Among Republicans, it’s common to raise the specter of Social Security or Medicare going bankrupt soon. That gets you high marks from the Commentariat for being realistic.

But saying what you want to do about that envisioned bankruptcy is another matter. Because once you accept that dogma that no tax can be raised under any circumstances, the only alternative is to make significant cuts in benefits. The more specific you get about those cuts, the less likely anyone is to applaud.

I haven’t read Christie’s plan, but U. S. News summarized it like this:

Christie proposed increasing the retirement age for Social Security to 69, beginning with gradual increases in 2022, as well as raising the early retirement age to 64 from 62, and changing the way cost-of-living increases are calculated for Social Security and other benefit programs, an adjustment that would mean smaller increases in the future.

He’d also increase the Medicare eligibility age gradually to 67 by 2040 — and turn Medicaid into a block grant program to the states, which Republicans have long proposed and critics say could mean reduced benefits over time. … the New Jersey governor also proposed reducing Social Security benefits in the future for retirees earning more than $80,000 a year and eliminating them for those with annual incomes of $200,000 or more.

I have two snap reactions:

1. There’s a hidden class issue in raising the age limits. If you look at the population as a whole, people are living longer, so it makes sense to gradually raise the ages. But that increase in life expectancy is much smaller for the poor, and to keep working past 65 is much harder if you do manual labor than if you have a desk job.
2. When you eliminate benefits for those who don’t need them, you’re implicitly turning Social Security and Medicare into welfare programs. The next step is for conservatives to start squeezing those programs the way they squeeze all welfare programs, making those who continue to benefit seem like losers and moochers.

Still, if this plan forces all the other candidates to get specific, that would raise the quality of discussion.

and more about 2016

This week my 2016 speeches series discusses Marco Rubio’s announcement speech on Monday. I stayed serious in that article, so I didn’t get around to mentioning this line from Monday’s Conan O’Brien monologue:

A little fun fact: Marco Rubio’s wife is a former Miami Dolphin cheerleader. In other words, she knows how to generate fake enthusiasm for someone who’s not going to win.

I haven’t included Hillary Clinton’s announcement video in my 2016 Speeches series because there just isn’t enough content there to talk about. It’s well designed, and does a good job of identifying her with Americans who are working towards better things in their lives, but it doesn’t try to answer the basic questions my series is focused on: “Where does America need to go and why am I the person to lead it there?” Presumably she’ll develop a stump speech later on, and then I’ll cover it.

Meanwhile, Hillary’s poll numbers look great: She’s beating Rubio by 14 points nationally, and every other potential Republican opponent by more. The CNN commentary on the poll shows just how far you have to go to spin something against Clinton.

One area where Clinton’s numbers wilt: Only about half of Democratic men (49%) say they would be enthusiastic about having Clinton atop the Democratic ticket, compared with nearly two-thirds of Democratic women (65%).

Think about it: Half the people who are different from you in some key demographic describe themselves as enthusiastic about nominating you for president. And that’s the bad news.

The basic problem all the Republicans face is that they’re either unknown or unpopular. I believe that’s because the Republican worldview is unpopular. Once the public understands what a Republican candidate wants to do, they don’t like him.

I went to a Martin O’Malley event in Nashua (walking distance from my apartment) a couple weeks ago, but I haven’t covered it either. He was speaking to a local Young Democrats meeting. (I do a really bad impersonation of a young Democrat.)

He sounded some basic progressive themes about the destruction of the middle class since the 1970s (i.e., before Reagan took office), and pointed to his own accomplishments as governor of Maryland, but the talk was short and lacked specifics. He didn’t take questions. Like Hillary, he’ll probably flesh out that speech later in the campaign (if he’s really running).

Fun personal facts about O’Malley: He’s a perform-in-public guitar player and led us in singing “This Land is Your Land”. Also, O’Malley is often cited as the model for the Tommy Carcetti character on The Wire. (David Simon says not exactly, but admits O’Malley is one of several inspirations.)

Carcetti is a young white mayor of Baltimore whose ambition ultimately overcomes his idealism. No doubt O’Malley would reject that characterization of his two terms as mayor (1999-2007), which coincidentally overlapped the run of The Wire (2002-2008). Wikipedia says:

During his first mayoral campaign, O’Malley focused on a message of reducing crime. In his first year in office, O’Malley adopted a statistics-based tracking system called CitiStat

which does sound a lot like Carcetti. One persistent theme of The Wire is that statistics-based anything just tempts a bureaucracy to corrupt the data it reports. (When one police detective deduces where the bodies of dozens of missing mobsters must be hidden, his superiors don’t want to look. “You’re talking about raising the murder rate,” one tells him.)

Wednesday, I was at Chris Christie’s town hall meeting in Londonderry (about ten miles down the road). I may get around to describing that in detail in later weeks, but this week I’ll just observe that Christie does an A+ town hall meeting.

A town hall meeting is like an oral exam on public policy, because the candidate can’t predict what people are going to ask. It’s a high-risk situation: If all you know are a few talking points, that quickly becomes obvious, and any mistake you make could be the lead story on the evening news.

But the upside is that if you do a town hall well, the hundreds of people in the room come away far more impressed than if you just gave a good speech. In the 2000 New Hampshire campaign, front-runner George W. Bush avoided town halls (probably because he would have made a fool of himself) while John McCain sometimes did four or five in a day, and was still sharp for the last one. McCain upset Bush in the primary by a wide margin.

Christie’s Londonderry town hall was at a McCain level. (His opening remarks are on YouTube, but that’s the least impressive part. I’m just out of the picture to the left.) He demonstrated a broad and deep understanding of the issues, even to someone like me who disagrees with his answers. He’s nowhere in the polls right now, and I’m not saying he’ll win New Hampshire. But I think he’ll do better than the pundits are predicting.

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Every change is bad for somebody. As solar energy gets cheaper, that’s good for the environment, good for homeowners and businesses, and good for the people who install solar panels.

Who’s it bad for? Utilities. Not only do they sell less power to homes with solar panels, but many states force them to buy the excess power the homes generate on sunny days. They don’t know how to predict the surges, and the transmission system wasn’t built for that.

Don’t get me started on upgrading the electrical grid. That was the project I wanted the Stimulus to focus on in 2009, and it’s even more needed now. But instead we can watch utilities try to use their lobbyists to torpedo the growth of solar.

The NYT article I linked to mentions one small-scale solution: more expensive solar installations that include batteries, so that you can store your own power and don’t rely on the grid buying it from you. One cool two-birds-with-one-stone idea is to repurpose the batteries from worn-out hybrid cars, which there should be more and more of in the coming years.

If you’re wondering what happens in abstinence-based sex education, this Michigan mom (and medical ethics professor) sat in on her son’s class. If anybody in the state legislatures are looking for wastes of tax money, abstinence programs are a place to start.

On the other hand, if you want your kid to get accurate, realistic information about sex and you live anywhere near a Unitarian church, ask if they’ll let him/her into their OWL class. Increasingly, this is what we’re coming to: you have to go to a liberal church to overcome the religion-based crap you learn in the public schools.

The North Carolina legislature is considering destroying two of the universities that define the Research Triangle by mandating a four-courses-a-semester teaching load on all professors at state universities. The head of UNC’s history department told The Daily Tarheel: “There is no major research university in the U.S. that has a four-four teaching load. I think faculty would leave.”

Slate‘s Rebecca Shuman calls the bill: “a “solution’ that could only be proposed by someone who either doesn’t know how research works or hates it.”

Half a century ago, the ideal state university was a world-class institution where tuition was so low (zero at Berkeley until Reagan fixed that “problem”) that any qualified student could afford to go there. Since then, states have been gradually getting out of the great-education-at-low-cost business, slashing their subsidies to the point that tuition at a top state university (not to mention fees and housing) can run more than $16K a year for in-state students and nearly as much as an elite private university for out-of-state students.

It only makes sense that the next step is to get rid of the idea of being a world-class institution. Why do people who can’t afford Yale need a great education anyway? Why do they need professors on the cutting edge, or the chance to work on the frontiers of knowledge? Leave that for the rich kids.

While we’re discussing ways to make the ruling class more hereditary than it already is, this week’s other featured article is “Death, Taxes, and the American Dream“. It’s my response to the House’s attempt to eliminate the estate tax, which already only applies to estates worth more than $5 million.

Here’s how desperate the anti-marriage-equality folks are for a new argument:

A reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women.

and let’s close with something unexpected

Headis. It seems to be a thing in Germany.

I have no doubt that Christian conservatives do feel limited by other people’s rights. There is that saying, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” Christian conservatives are arguing that they should be able to punch you in the nose if that desire to punch you in the nose is sincerely held.

— Amanda Marcotte, How Conservatives Hijacked ‘Religious Freedom’

This week’s featured posts are “The 2016 Stump Speeches: Introducing the Series“, “The 2016 Stump Speeches: Ted Cruz“, and “Religious Freedom: Colorado’s sensible middle way“.

This week everybody was still talking about “religious freedom”

Indiana passed a “clarification” of last week’s “religious freedom” law:

The fix provides that Indiana’s RFRA does not authorize businesses “to refuse to offer or provide services, facilities, use of public accommodation, goods, employment, or housing to any member or members of the general public” on the basis of a list of protected traits that includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Another provision provides that the state’s RFRA law does not “establish a defense to a civil action or criminal prosecution” brought against someone who engages in such discrimination.

So it rolls back the worst of the new law, but in no case does it do any more than restore the status quo. Arkansas likewise watered down the RFRA it passed last week, though I’m not clear on the details.

I started to do a short explanation of how I think First Amendment rights should balance against gay rights, but it got out of hand so I turned it into its own article.

Bigotry can be profitable! That Indiana pizza shop has collected over $800K in donations, while the Oregon florist that was fined $1K has gotten $85K to help pay it.

CNN’s conversation with several florists in rural Georgia implicitly pointed out one of the holes in conservative Christian theology: They treat homosexuality as a more serious sin than just about anything else, when there’s no Biblical justification for doing so. There are a handful of verses in the Bible against homosexuality, but the idea that it’s worse than other common sins — premarital sex, say — is not Biblical.

and a nuclear deal with Iran

Or at least the framework of a deal that both sides are committed to finishing by the end of June.

Salon’s Jim Newell suggests that any politician who wants to renounce the deal be asked what they’d do next. He lists the realistic options he sees:

(1) sitting around and hoping that some magical unicorns swoop into Iran, topple its regime, and put in place a United States puppet government or (2) bombing Iran.

Rachel Maddow did a good job of summarizing the technical details involved, and why they matter.

Steve Benen discusses the plans in Congress to sabotage the deal.

and a massacre in Kenya

The al-Shabab terrorist group killed 148 people in an attack on a university.

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Thursday will be the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender, which effectively ended the Civil War. Brian Beutler makes a modest proposal, which I endorse:

to mark the occasion, the federal government should make two modest changes: It should make April 9 a federal holiday; and it should commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support.

The Bob Menendez corruption case demonstrates the kind of corruption that Justice Kennedy didn’t think would be an issue.

Who’re the oldest “people” in the United States? Corporate people. The oldest ones just turned 129.

11 Atlanta educators were convicted in a plot to raise test scores through cheating. 178 teachers and principals were involved, and 35 were indicted, with most negotiating guilty pleas to lesser charges.

This case exposes an important flaw in the high-stakes-testing approach to education, in which the futures of everyone from students and teachers to mayors and governors ride on test scores. Literally everyone in the system has a motive to cheat, and no one has a motive to catch cheaters. According to the NYT:

Evidence of systemic cheating has emerged in as many as a dozen places across the country, and protests in Chicago, New York City, Seattle, across Texas and elsewhere represent a growing backlash among educators and parents against high-stakes testing.

So if you’re going to do testing right, you need an independent testing bureaucracy, with its own employees and budget. And once you figure in the cost of that, I think the whole scheme might become impractical.

Here’s another Indiana law that should give people pause: After taking drugs to induce a miscarriage, a woman was convicted of “feticide” and sentenced to 20 years.

While we’re all waiting to see if the Supreme Court monkey-wrenches ObamaCare, it just did some serious damage to Medicaid.

and let’s close with a taste of things to come

Comedy Central has announced Jon Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show: South African comic Trevor Noah. In spite of some early problems, this could be good:

I have not yet heard … a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody has presented me a credible scenario.

— President Barack Obama

This week everybody was talking about Netanyahu’s re-election

What that means is the subject of this week’s featured post “What Just Happened?“. My main take-away from the election is that the problem in Israel isn’t Netanyahu, it’s the electorate.

One of the things I don’t discuss in that article is the early exit polls, which predicted a much closer election. Whenever that happens, suspicious people start charging fraud. In this case, though, it looks like late-and-early voters just voted differently than mid-day voters.

Now, a surge just before polls close is sometimes evidence of a different kind of fraud, but I haven’t seen any supporting evidence for that. In the U.S., you’d be talking about the difference between people who have day jobs and the rest of us. But in Israel, Election Day is a national holiday, so that’s not it.

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions here. If something is actually wrong, Israelis will probably figure it out for themselves.

and debates about the budget

It will be interesting to see whether Republicans in Congress can agree with themselves on next year’s budget; then we can worry about whether Democrats will filibuster or Obama will veto.

The basic political problem of the budget is that Americans grossly overestimate how much the government spends on things they don’t like. So cutting government spending sounds good in the abstract, but the vast majority of federal spending goes for stuff that is widely popular, like defense, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, and highway construction. A lot of the rest is spent on stuff that is useful and necessary: air traffic control, disaster relief, disease control, food safety, and so on. You may not think about it very often, but as soon as somebody dies of Ebola or a batch of tainted food hits the market, everybody wonders why the government doesn’t have this under control already.

What’s left is mostly spent on poor kids and poor sick people. When it’s made clear what a spending cut will do, in terms of kids going hungry and sick people dying, cutting there isn’t all that popular either.

So if you want to make major cuts, the best way to do it is to hide what you’re cutting. The two main tricks for doing this are the block grant and the magic asterisk. The proposed Republican budget (which achieves balance by 2025) has both.

The magic asterisk is an unspecified $1.1 trillion cut over ten years in “Other Mandatory” spending. The WaPo’s Wonkblog explains:

Other than health care and Social Security, mandatory spending includes a range of programs such as food stamps, disability payments for veterans, the earned income tax credit, and Pell grants for college students. The budget document did not specify which would be cut.

So if you’re a disabled veteran wondering if this means you’re going to be cut off — or anybody else who might be affected — your Republican congressman can assure you: “No, we meant other Other Mandatory spending.” He can say that to everybody.

The problem with magic-asterisk budgeting is that when it comes time to pass an appropriations bill, the Republicans will discover they can’t: They never really agreed on specific spending cuts, they just agreed on the abstract idea of spending cuts.

Block grants just push the sleight-of-hand down to the states. Ezra Klein explains:

A block grant takes money the federal government is already spending on a program and gives it to the states to administer — usually with fewer rules and conditions. That’s it. The hope is that states will use the money more efficiently. But block grants can cost more, cost the same, or cost less than the funding mechanisms they replace. Block grants change how money is spent, not necessarily how much money is spent.

… There’s nothing magic about block grants that makes Medicaid cost $700 billion less; it just sounds better to say you’re going to save money by block-granting Medicaid and food stamps then by cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and food stamps.

The reason these kinds of tricks are necessary is that the federal budget is generally money well spent. If there were trillions budgeted for bridges to nowhere, Republicans wouldn’t have to hide what they’re cutting.

and I finally got around to paying attention to Hillary’s emails

I’ve had trouble getting interested in this story, because I know lots of people in Clinton’s generation who think email is magic. They use their mail app and something happens; they can’t be bothered with what it is. Colin Powell also used a private email account to do business as Secretary of State, because, well, who knows why? He didn’t think his email was broken when he became Secretary, so he didn’t fix it.

Nobody really cares about government email archives unless some other story makes them care. If you’re a Benghazi conspiracy theorist, for example, the fact that there might be a hidden trove of conspiratorial Clinton emails somewhere is a big deal; it keeps your fantasies alive. But none of those people were going to vote for Clinton anyway.

Another reason people might care is if Hillary were running as some squeaky-clean good-government reformer. Then the idea that she might have cut a corner somewhere would spoil the image she’s trying to project. But that image was never going to work anyway, and Clinton surely knew that already.

So there’s the possibility that the email story might feed into some other story later, and that people might care about it then. But until then, it’s no big deal.

What the story does point out, though, is the risk of Democrats putting all their eggs in the Clinton basket so early in the process. If tomorrow Jeb Bush were caught in a tryst with an underage boy, Republicans would shake their heads sadly and move on to the next candidate. But if some scandal or unexpected medical problem put Hillary out of the race, Democrats would be scrambling.

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Alternet points out one thing that’s wrong with our national discussion of education policy: Often nobody in the room is an actual educator. No teachers, no principals, no education researchers, no professors of education — just “individuals from influential right-wing think tanks, with little to no scholarly work or graduate-level degree work in education.”

That’s not just on TV, it’s in fairly highbrow publications like The Economist. So that’s something to keep in mind the next time you watch or read a piece about how our education system needs to be completely re-organized: Is there any reason to believe that these people know what they’re talking about? Are the people presented as “experts” any more knowledgeable than someone you might meet at a bar?

While we’re on the subject, ThinkProgress observes that “Every Claim In This Ted Cruz Statement Is Completely False“. The statement is about the Common Core education standards, which Cruz says he will “repeal every word” of.

When someone asked his office what that could possibly mean, since Common Core is not a law and so can’t be “repealed”, a Cruz spokesperson said:

Common Core is a federally created curriculum that the state’s ‘Race to the Top’ grants are tied to,” offered Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Cruz. “So if the state does not adopt the standards, it gives up the grant money. But since the federal government created this mess, there should be a way to undo it.

And that’s the statement that is completely false. CC is not federally created, it’s not a curriculum, Race to the Top didn’t tie grants to it, and since the grants are almost all spent already anyway, there can’t be any penalty for a state to un-adopt the standards if it wants to.

But if none of the claims are true, they’re all “truthy” to Cruz’s right-wing target audience. So I’m sure he’ll keep repeating them.

Still on education: Remember Dave Brat, the Tea Party insurgent who upset Eric Cantor in a primary? He’s in Congress now, and he says education funding isn’t necessary, because “Socrates trained Plato on a rock.”

Aside from just being false — Plato was a aristocrat, and had a lot of expensive teachers before Socrates — Brat’s remark is evidence of a serious problem in his thinking: Are we just trying to train a handful of aristocratic geniuses, or do we want to have an educated society? Or does he think we could hire a Socrates for every child in America? If we could, maybe we could teach them on rocks.

Proof the NFL concussion problem is considered serious: 24-year-old Chris Borland, who was a well-regarded rookie linebacker for the 49ers last season, announced his retirement. He’s had only one concussion, described as “minor”, but: “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”

He’s worked most of his young life to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL, and now he’s in a position to make millions. But it’s not worth the risk.

and let’s close with a moment of Zen

What was the law, when bright shiny money was in sight?
Money make the train go.

— Charley Barbour,
quoted in The American Slave, a Composite Autobiography

This week’s featured post is “Justice in Ferguson“.

This week everybody was talking about Ferguson again

The Justice Department published two reports Wednesday, one about the Michael Brown shooting and the other about the Ferguson Police Department. I discuss them in detail in “Justice in Ferguson“, but the short version is that Darren Wilson’s story is plausible and he shouldn’t be indicted, while the FPD is a predatory institution that needs drastic reform.

and Selma

Tens of thousands of people marched across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama to mark the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

President Obama’s speech was a marvelous expression of the liberal vision of America.

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. … That’s what it means to love America. That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional. … That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing.

Meanwhile (and Obama referred to this) the achievements of fifty years ago are threatened. The Supreme Court has gutted the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act and the Republican Congress continues to refuse to fix it. The hole that the Court blew in the VRA has invited voter suppression of all sorts.

and Netanyahu vs. Iran

The politics of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress has been widely discussed, both here and in Israel. But reading the text, I found myself thinking more about the content: Is he right about Iran?

Some of what he had to say was obviously exaggerated. Like this:

In the Middle East, Iran now dominates four capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left unchecked more will surely follow.

Juan Cole examines this claim capital-by-capital, but the gist is that Iran has given material support to factions in local conflicts that it did not start. (In Baghdad, we started it.) Those factions have been successful in varying degrees, but in none of the four cases has there been anything like an Iranian conquest or occupation, nor is there likely to be. Iran is playing the Great Game, just as we are and Israel is.

A more interesting notion lies in the background of Netanyahu’s remarks, and in most neo-con discussion of Iran: the idea that an Iranian bomb would be uniquely horrible, because Iran’s nature as an Islamic Republic makes it immune to the kind of deterrence that kept the Soviet Union in check. In this telling of the story, Iran’s leadership is motivated by an apocalyptic theology that would happily use nukes against Israel and glory in the ensuing end-of-the-world destruction when Israel retaliated with the nukes it has never admitted it has.

Having discussed just two weeks ago how another force in the region — ISIL — is motivated by apocalyptic theology, I can’t just reject this argument as absurd. But is it true? Is Iran essentially a nation-sized suicide bomber?

Other people have studied this question, and the answer seems to be no. Back in 2011, Matthew Duss wrote “The Martyr State Myth” for Foreign Policy.

The “martyr state” myth is based upon two flawed assumptions. First, that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been uniquely willing to endure the deaths of its own citizens in order to achieve its policy goals. Second, that the Iranian Shiite regime’s End Times theology actually induces it to trigger a conflagration.

Quoting previous studies, he finds that Iran’s willingness to sacrifice its citizens pales in comparison to the Soviet and Chinese regimes that were deterred by retaliation, and that claims of the Iranian regime’s desire for martyrdom

are unsupported by anything like evidence, but rather have achieved the status of conventional wisdom simply by repetition.

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did like to talk in apocalyptic terms, but he

• is not president any more
• didn’t have control of Iranian military policy when he was president
• was criticized for his apocalypticism by the ruling imams.

By contrast, Iran’s Supreme Leader is in no particular hurry to be Supreme Leader of a pile of rubble.

and the Supreme Court looking at ObamaCare again

The oral arguments in King vs. Burwell have begun. The case hangs on one sentence in the Affordable Care Act, which (if interpreted without reference to anything outside that sentence) would mean that ObamaCare subsidies could only go to people in states that had their own ObamaCare exchanges, rather people living in states whose exchanges were set up by the federal government.

There has been a certain absurdity to the case from the beginning, since there is ample evidence that no one in Congress intended that result. So the plaintiff’s arguments have all been a little like “You didn’t say ‘Simon says’.”

The Obama administration’s counter-argument is that the executive branch has a responsibility to interpret laws in ways that work, rather than in ways that don’t work, so the IRS has acted correctly in interpreting the law as it has. The precedents seem to be on its side, and I don’t believe this case would ever have reached the Supreme Court without a number of activist conservative judges seeking to repeal laws they don’t like.

The big thing we’ve learned from the justices’ questioning is that there is a conservative reason reject the case, hinted at by Justice Kennedy and drawn out further by Justice Sotomayor: Congress may not have had the power to pass the law as the conservative activist judges have been interpreting it, at least not under a conservative interpretation of the relationship between the federal government and the states.

If the law really did only subsidize people on exchanges states set up, that would be a substantial penalty to states that refused to set up their own exchanges. That kind of monetary pressure (to set up state exchanges) was precisely why (when ObamaCare reached the Court in 2012) the Court threw out the provisions of the law that pushed the states to expand Medicaid.

The legal principle Chief Justice Roberts invoked when he cast the deciding vote to save ObamaCare in 2012 was that the courts have to presume that Congress intended to pass laws that are constitutional. So if one interpretation of a law makes it constitutional and another unconstitutional, courts should favor the constitutional interpretation.

and you also might be interested in …

Correction: Last week I identified FBI agents as potential victims of a Homeland Security shutdown. As a commenter pointed out, the FBI isn’t in DHS, it’s in the Department of Justice.

Meanwhile, Speaker Boehner relented and allowed the House to vote on a clean bill to fund DHS through September. It passed, as it would have weeks ago, without any sturm und drang. The problem for Boehner was that his caucus wanted to continue holding the country’s security hostage: Republicans voted against the clean funding bill 167-75.

Vox added this example to its list of “every major crisis or near-crisis that’s been resolved by Boehner giving up on conservatives and passing a bill with Democratic support.”

Next up: the debt limit. Mitch McConnell says it will pass, but he also says:

We’ll figure some way to handle that and hopefully it might carry some other important legislation that we can agree on in connection with it.

In other words, there’s going to be another hostage crisis. You can replace “other important legislation” with “list of demands”.

I could repeat everything I said last week about Republican governance, but I think I’ll just link to it.

Jonathan Waldman in the NYT says “Don’t Kill Keystone XL, Regulate It“.

“Pipelines are the safest way to move oil,” he says, and they could be made better if regulators insisted on the best technology. I have no argument with that. But he takes one thing as given:

[B]locking [the pipeline] won’t actually prevent Canada from extracting its tar sands oil. Ours is an energy-thirsty world, and when demand eventually drives up the price of oil, out it will come.

I’m not willing to grant that. Canada is going to extract some of its tar sands oil. How much it makes sense to extract at a given oil-price depends on transportation costs, which depends on infrastructure like Keystone XL. And alternative fuels are competitive enough to keep the price of oil from going to infinity.

An incident at UCLA has raised discussion about anti-semitism on campus. Anti-semitism in America is a tricky thing to measure and document, because American Jews tend to be above average in many kinds of achievement and representation. It also gets tied up with political opinions about Israel and America’s support of Israel.

I’ve been mostly silent about anti-semitism not because I’ve decided it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter, but because I don’t have a good handle on it. I’m still thinking and reading, so maybe that will change.

A fifth-grade teacher in Chicago writes a letter of apology to her students before inflicting on them the latest round of standardized tests.

I do not agree that these tests will tell me what I really need to know about you as a learner or as a human being. I do not agree that these tests will make me a better teacher. I do not agree that these tests will improve our schools. I do not agree that you need to sit in front of a computer for over five hours in order for the government to find out what you know and what you can do. I do not agree that you should not have a choice in how you are able to show all of the things that you are capable of doing. I do not agree that in order for the state to know that I am doing my job that you have to suffer through tests that could quite possibly ruin much of the hard work that we have done together in building your confidence this year and in helping you to see yourselves as readers and writers. I do not agree with these tests.

and let’s close with something amusing

I believe no dogs were harmed in the making of “12 Dogs Who Really Didn’t Expect the Snow to Be This Deep“.