The Weekly Sift

These days the House Republicans actually give John Boehner a harder time than they give me. Which means orange really is the new black.

— President Barack Obama
Saturday night at the White House Correspondents Dinner

This week’s featured posts are “Restoring the Constitution is Now a Liberal Issue” and “No, Donald Sterling Isn’t the Victim“.

This week everybody was talking about Donald Sterling

The media has already over-covered this — Wikipedia’s just-the-facts summary is here — but one aspect of the story caught my eye: The impulse of conservatives to jump to paint Sterling as the victim, which I argued against in “No, Donald Sterling Isn’t the Victim“.

A commentary on this phenomenon that I like even better than my own is by Tod Kelly at the Ordinary Times group blog (a blog more people should read regularly). He points out that the Sterling incident is working out exactly the way conservatives always say racism should be fought: Government is taking a back seat to market pressures on the NBA owners. And yet — and this is his key point — conservative opinion leaders are unable to crow about this because their instincts pull them towards defending the racist billionaire. In a nutshell, this is why Republicans have so much trouble attracting minorities.

This, then, is the backdrop conservative pundits had to work with, less than a week after the anti-government rancher they had championed revealed himself to be (oops!) pro-slavery: A perfect, slow underhand lob of a pitch, right across the plate, begging to be knocked out of the park with declarations of how the Free Market won and defeated racism more completely than the government ever could — just like the GOP always promised it would. Frank Lutz couldn’t have come up with a better opportunity to reach out to minorities if he’d scripted the entire universe itself.

So, what did they do?

After a brief stint at condemning him when they mistakenly thought he was a registered Democrat, one of two things: They defended Donald Sterling, or they sat silent as their colleague defended him.

… That is why conservatives are always so successfully painted as bigots by their opponents. That is why the stink of Cliven Bundys sticks to them even when they try hard to separate themselves. That is why they can’t win a state or national election that requires a majority of non-white votes. That is why, when conservatives actually do throw “Minority Outreach Parties,” nobody shows up.

and (God help us) Benghazi

Even some Republicans are getting tired of the endless obsession with any trivia that can be twisted to stimulate the Republican base or make either President Obama or Hillary Clinton look bad. The head of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), issued a statement criticizing the testimony of this week’s star witness, Brigadier General Robert Lovell.

The Armed Services Committee has interviewed more than a dozen witnesses in the operational chain of command that night, yielding thousands of pages of transcripts, e-mails, and other documents.  We have no evidence that Department of State officials delayed the decision to deploy what few resources DoD had available to respond.

In the end, while BG Lovell did not further the investigation or reveal anything new, he was another painful reminder of the agony our military felt that night; wanting to respond but unable to do so.

The developments that provide an excuse for a new round of Benghazi stories are summarized by ThinkProgress in an article called “Please Don’t Read This Benghazi Article“.

Sean Hannity is asking his panels whether or not Benghazi is “worse than Watergate” because four Americans died at Benghazi as opposed to none at the Watergate. A more apt comparison might be the Lebanon bombing during the Reagan administration. 241 American servicemen died there, but I don’t recall any comparisons to Watergate.

and John Kerry’s apartheid comment

Secretary of State Kerry got into hot water this week when his comments in a closed-door meeting leaked. Kerry warned that if the two-state model for peace is abandoned, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state“.

Objections seem to center on the word apartheid, which comes from the old white-dominated South African government and suggests the South African solution of a boycott. But the gist of Kerry’s point is hard to argue with: If the region currently governed by Israel remains under its control, and if current demographic trends continue, Jews will eventually become a minority in a Jewish-dominated state, while Palestinians in the occupied territories will continue to have limited rights defined by an Israeli government they can’t vote on. You may or may not choose to call that apartheid, but it is what it is.

and the death penalty

Oklahoma botched an execution. The condemned man died, but it’s not supposed to be like this.

Thoughtful people used this occasion to ask: Why exactly do we have the death penalty? According to the Supreme Court, if the purpose were to make the victim suffer, that would be cruel and unusual punishment. (Which is not a problem for some people.) In retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ new book (which I review here) he raises the question: If it’s not about retribution, what purpose does it serve? It’s hard to believe murderers calculate the difference between the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole. Nobody escapes from our supermax prisons. The appeals process is so expensive and time-consuming that execution doesn’t save money. There’s a racial disparity in how we apply it, and we appear to execute the wrong person surprisingly often.

So why do we keep doing this?

and you also might be interested in …

Excellent article at Demos “Stacked Deck: how the dominance of politics by the affluent and business undermines economic mobility in America“. It quantifies a number of the ways in which the political priorities of the rich are different from those of the rest of America.

For example, only 40 percent of the wealthy think the minimum wage should be high enough to prevent full-time workers from being in poverty while 78 percent of the general public holds this view.

That’s why it’s a problem that Congress responds primarily to the rich: They don’t represent the rest of us.

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Several disturbing reports from the militia at the Bundy Ranch. Nevada Congressman Steven Horsford says his constituents have complained to him about “checkpoints where residents are required to prove they live in the area before being allowed to pass”. But I’m withholding judgment until I see a video of one. If the checkpoints are there, video shouldn’t be hard to get.

Then there’s the general problem of getting too many armed crazies in one location. The Oath Keepers contingent of the Bundy militia withdrew after believing a rumor that Attorney General Holder had authorized a drone strike against them. (They’re now blaming government “psy-ops” and “disinformation”, rather than their own paranoid gullibility.) Other contingents don’t want to let them come back, talking about what happens to “deserters on the battlefield”.

To quote General Petraeus: Tell me how this ends.

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Reihan Salam describes “How the [Tea Party] movement can save itself and become a powerful force for good.” Short version: It can act nothing at all like the Tea Party.

If the Tea Party were to fight crony capitalism as hard as it fights wasteful spending, and if its members were to train their anger on the Wall Street-Washington axis that deserves so much of the blame for our stagnant economy, it would be the most constructive and powerful political force of our time.

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There’s a kind of racism more insidious and harder to root out than the open Donald-Sterling-style stuff. Reviewers rated a legal brief lower and found more mistakes when they were told that the author was black.

When the author is supposed to be white, reviewers excused errors as out of haste or inexperience. They commented that the author “has potential” and was “generally a good writer but needs to work on” some skills. When the author is supposed to be black, those same errors became evidence of incompetence. A reviewer said he “can’t believe he [the author] went to NYU,” and others said he “needs lots of work” and was “average at best.”

and let’s end with the comedy stylings of Obama and Biden

The Prez was at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Louis CK has nothing to worry about, but he’s not too bad.

Meanwhile, V. P. Biden couldn’t attend. He had better things to do.

Clearly, when one holds constant net interest group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. … [A]dvocates of populistic democracy may not be enthusiastic about democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.

— Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page
“Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” (2014)

This week’s featured articles are “Democracy By Coincidence” and “Rights Are For People Like Us“.

This week everybody was talking about the anniversaries

It’s Marathon Day in Boston, which brings back memories of last year’s marathon. I want to make a claim for having been right in my article “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now“. Then I imagined that the Boston Marathon Bombing could be an anti-9/11, one where heroes saved people rather than dying in the attempt, one that we faced and dealt with as it happened, rather than having unresolved issues we had to take to Afghanistan and Iraq.

I think that happened. Something has gone out of the 9-11 mythology in the last year. It’s just not fresh any more. I think we exorcized those demons.

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. There, I wish I had such an upbeat story to tell. As Mother Jones put it:

Nothing changed after 13 people were killed at Columbine, or 33 at Virginia Tech, or 26 at Sandy Hook. Each of those tragedies came with the same breaking-news urgency as Columbine, but none generated the same sense of expected action because fewer and fewer people actually believed things could change.

and Ukraine

The Geneva agreement to corral the unrest in eastern Ukraine is faltering. The pro-Russian militants who have occupied several public buildings in various cities have ignored it, and yesterday a shoot-out near Slaviansk killed three people.

Somebody in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk distributed leaflets saying that Jews had to register with the city’s self-appointed pro-Russian separatist government. No one is claiming responsibility for the leaflets or actually registering Jews. It may be a joke, a provocation, a trial balloon … who knows? I mention it just because you may have heard about it.

and right-wing extremists like Cliven Bundy and Frazier Glenn Miller

I discuss Cliven Bundy in “Rights Are For People Like Us“. Frazier Glenn Miller is the 73-year-old KKK grand dragon who shot at three Jewish centers in Kansas City, killing three people, none of whom were Jewish.

Miller’s case prompted a meta-discussion on the left. Rachel Maddow wondered why the media treats each act of right-wing terrorism as a unique event, rather than yet another instance of right-wing terrorism. CNN’s Peter Bergen wrote:

Now let’s do the thought experiment in which instead of shouting “Heil Hitler” after he was arrested, the suspect had shouted “Allahu Akbar.” Only two days before the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, this simple switch of words would surely have greatly increased the extent and type of coverage the incident received.

Bergen claims right-wing terrorists have killed 34 people in the United States since 9-11, compared to 21 by jihadists. Remember that report that Homeland Security had to withdraw in 2009 because conservatives found it upsetting?

and Easter

Not many people celebrate a really old-fashioned Easter any more.

and you also might be interested in …

Once again: What’s the matter with Kansas? You might think getting the First Lady to speak at your high school graduation would be cool, particularly since her husband can’t run again, so there’s no way this is a campaign speech. (I can’t remember who spoke at my high school graduation, which says it all. Four years later, some congressman talked about farm policy at my Michigan State graduation. I was jealous of the Harvard grads, who got Solzhenitsyn that year.) But no. In Kansas, parents think having Mrs. Obama speak will take “the glory and shine from the children.”

Meanwhile, Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp makes this amazing claim:

But the numbers we see today is that — as I understand them — we believe there are more people uninsured today in Kansas than there were before the president’s health care plan went into effect.

No idea where he got those numbers; his office won’t say. Gallup has Kansas’ uninsured rate dropping from 16.2% in 2010 to 12.9% this January. In general, the uninsured rate has dropped faster in states that have embraced ObamaCare by extending Medicare and setting up a state insurance exchange; Kansas has done neither.

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If you’ve ever downloaded a Cheerios coupon or liked General Mills on Facebook, I’ll bet you didn’t know that General Mills thinks you’ve given up the right to sue the company. I’m considering posting a small-type notice outside my door notifying visitors that by entering my apartment they’ve given me the right to sell their first-born children into slavery. Not that I’d actually do it; I’m such a nice guy, after all. But it might a useful power to have, just in case.

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Game of Thrones humor: An honest trailer (with spoilers). Tail wags dog: George R. R. Martin is “a rogue enthusiast … who has written five whole volumes consisting solely of spoilers for the popular television show.” A social-media-company version of the title sequence.

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See if your city has a judgmental map.

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Elizabeth Hand says she was “saved by ObamaCare“. When are stories like that going to get the kind of media traction that the debunked horror stories did?

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Jonathan Chait says that the belief that objective data can lead to nonpartisan or bipartisan solutions is itself a liberal notion.

Evaluating health care, or other government programs, by objective criteria sounds perfectly neutral. But to do so is to disregard the deep moral belief held by most conservatives that big government is inherently wrong. The empirical evenhandedness of the new data journalists is a wonderful contribution to American public life. It is, however, anything but politically neutral.

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The Daily Beast pulls together several recent sex scandals in the Christian patriarchy movement to make this point:

The “pitch” of Biblical patriarchy … is that women will be coddled and worshipped in exchange for giving up their ambitions and the autonomy to practice an extreme form of female submission. The unpleasant truth is that a culture that teaches that women are put on Earth for no other purpose but to serve men is not going to breed respect for women. Instead, these incidents show a world where men believe they can do whatever they want to women without repercussions. Is it any surprise that a subculture that promises absolute control over women will attract men who want to dominate and hurt women?

and let’s end with something cool

like maybe a solar-powered electric tricycle with a trunk big enough for groceries.

Or, if you only want 84 mpg:

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear April 13.

The record of thousands upon thousands of people arrested in this way is everywhere in the South. In the fall, when it was time to pick cotton, huge numbers of black people are arrested in all of the cotton-growing counties. There are surges in arrests in counties in Alabama in the days before, coincidentally, a labor agent from the coal mines in Birmingham is coming to town that day to pick up whichever county convicts are there. 

— Douglas Blackmon,
Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

And this system is one that I think in many ways needs to be understood as brutal in a social sense, but fiendishly rational in an economic sense. Because where else could one take a black worker and work them literally to death, after slavery? And when that worker died, one simply had to go and get another convict.

— Prof. Adam Green,  University of Chicago
quoted in Slavery By Another Name

This week’s featured articles are “Slavery Lasted Until Pearl Harbor” and “Not Primarily Students, Not Really Amateurs“.

This week lots of people were talking about the Supreme Court

The Court began hearing arguments in Hobby Lobby case testing the ObamaCare contraception mandate. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is pessimistic:

The rights of millions of women to preventive health care and workplace equality elicit almost no sign of sympathy or solicitude from the right wing of the bench today. Nor does the possibility that religious conscience objections may soon swallow up the civil rights laws protecting gay workers, women, and other minorities. Religious freedom trumps because we’re “only” talking about birth control.

In general, it’s a mistake to read too much into the questions the justices ask. When the constitutionality of the individual mandate was argued before the Court, I don’t remember anyone predicting that Chief Justice Roberts would save it.

and the ObamaCare deadline

Sort of. It was supposed to be today, but if you were in the process of applying and got hung up by the technical problems on the web site, you get to finish.

Administration officials … compare it to the Election Day practice of allowing people to vote if they are in line when the polls close.

According to the L.A. Times, 9.5 million previously uninsured Americans now have coverage: some directly through the ObamaCare marketplaces, some directly from insurance companies, some through the expansion of Medicaid, and some because the law allows more young people to stay on their parents insurance plans.

A series of ObamaCare horror stories have gotten national attention, mostly to be debunked later. But it’s about time that people start paying attention to the success stories.

It’s also time to make state-level Republicans pay the price for not expanding Medicaid. In an article on the Health Affairs blog, three public-health professors and a medical student run the numbers:

We estimate the number of deaths attributable to the lack of Medicaid expansion in opt-out states at between 7,115 and 17,104.  Medicaid expansion in opt-out states would have resulted in 712,037 fewer persons screening positive for depression and 240,700 fewer individuals suffering catastrophic medical expenditures. Medicaid expansion in these states would have resulted in 422,553 more diabetics receiving medication for their illness, 195,492 more mammograms among women age 50-64 years and 443,677 more pap smears among women age 21-64. Expansion would have resulted in an additional 658,888 women in need of mammograms gaining insurance, as well as 3.1 million women who should receive regular pap smears.

and the Christie administration’s report on the bridge scandal

which came to the unsurprising conclusion that Governor Christie did nothing wrong. “Our findings today are a vindication of Gov. Christie,” said the report‘s author, Randy Maestro.

In response, all of Chris Christie’s critics said, “I’m glad that’s settled, let’s move on.”

No, seriously, Christie’s critics were appalled that he spent taxpayer money to produce such a self-serving report, and the word “whitewash” keeps cropping up. Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer, who claims the administration withheld federal relief money from Hoboken after Hurricane Sandy to pressure her to approve a deal favoring Christie’s private-sector allies, said:

Randy Mastro could have written his report the day he was hired and saved the taxpayers the million dollars in fees he billed in generating this one-sided whitewash.

And the New York Times editorial page was equally unkind:

We can now add this expensive whitewash to the other evidence of trouble in Mr. Christie’s administration. If Mr. Christie really wants to win back public trust, he and his political allies can start by paying for this internal inquiry out of their own pockets. Then the governor and these lawyers can make all emails and any other crucial information available to federal and state investigators.

Investigations by the New Jersey legislature and the U.S. attorney will continue.

and (for some reason) a raft of sports-and-labor stories

beginning with the ruling that Northwestern’s football players are employees who can unionize. I cover this in “Not Primarily Students, Not Really Amateurs”

and you also might be interested in …

A federal appeals court in Texas found the state’s new regulations on abortion clinics constitutional, in spite of the fact that they have caused a third of the state’s abortion clinics to close and have little medical evidence supporting their value. The court found that living three hours away from the nearest clinic was not an undue burden on a woman’s right to have access to abortion services.

A similar law in Wisconsin has been found unconstitutional by that district’s appeals court. Since a law can’t be constitutional in one part of the country and unconstitutional in another, the Supreme Court will have to  resolve the difference.

Lately I’ve been on a reading jag centering on the Confederacy and the Reconstruction Era. (You’ll be hearing about it. Today’s book review is just the start.) I can’t help noticing the similarities between the current campaign against abortion rights and the South’s post-Reconstruction campaign against the rights former slaves were granted by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. In both cases, the strategy was to leave the rights on the books, but make them impossible to claim. The post-Reconstruction Supreme Court winked at that. We’ll see what this era’s Court does.

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Once you convince yourself that sexuality is a choice, all sorts of otherwise innocent things start to look like advertising for the gay “option”. AlterNet’s Katie Halper collects the “10 Weirdest Things the Christian Right Thinks Will Turn Your Kids Gay“.

One that deserves special attention is a 4000-word screed on the “Well-Behaved Mormon Woman” blog, which decodes the gay message encrypted in the Disney movie Frozen, and particularly in its hit song “Let It Go”. (The movie clip isn’t YouTubed, but a great cover is here.)

I haven’t seen the movie, but in WBMW’s retelling the plot centers on a princess whose parents insist her socially-unacceptable magic power be hidden, and how she finds liberation. What could a hidden power symbolize, other than lesbianism?

Actually, it might symbolize sexual desire in general, as dancing does in Footloose. Or maybe creativity, like the color in Pleasantville. Or the symbolism might vary from one viewer to the next. Maybe you were a reader in an anti-intellectual family, a rationalist in a religious family, or even a religious seeker in a rationalist family. (In this season of The Americans, it’s been fun watching the KGB-mole parents freak out as their daughter explores Christianity.) If you made it out the other side of adolescence, probably at some point you wondered whether the world could accept what you were finding inside yourself.

For Harry Chapin, the magic power of music might be locked inside an ordinary taxi driver:

Oh, I’ve got something inside me
To drive a princess blind.
There’s a wild man wizard,
He’s hiding in me, illuminating my mind.
Oh, I’ve got something inside me,
Not what my life’s about.
‘Cause I’ve been letting my outside tide me
Over ’til my time, runs out.

But to WBMW, a hidden magic power must be homosexuality. Personally, I agree with the analysis in Tom Lehrer’s “Smut“: “filth … is in the mind of the beholder”.

When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz — there’s a dirty old man.

One of her commenters wonders what WBMW will make of The Lego Movie, which I have seen. It really is propaganda in favor of a society that can reconfigure itself rather than be Krazy-glued into a single “ideal” arrangement. But then, if you squint really hard, Legos themselves are propaganda for that.

And I hope WBMW never takes a hard look at the mythology underlying the X-Men. You see, sometime in adolescence, previously normal kids discover that they’re “mutants” with special powers. Society is afraid of them and wants to kill them just for being what they are. So they stay hidden and band together secretly with other mutants.

How gay is that?

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Whenever I’m tempted to complain about NYT conservative columnist Ross Douthat, I recall that he replaced Bill Kristol and count my blessings. Douthat’s columns often imply some outright falsehood or rely on an outrageous leap of logic, but do seem to represent an intelligent person trying to make sense of the world.

For example, Sunday’s “The Christian Penumbra” — his two cents on “religious freedom”. He makes a point that I first heard in Robert Putnam’s American Grace: The benefits of religion come not from belief or even faith, but from practice and community. He goes on to blame the dysfunctionality of the Bible belt (high divorce rates, high teen pregnancy, high sexually transmitted diseases) on non-practicing believers. And then he completely loses me by arriving at some conclusion about Hobby-Lobby-style religious freedom.

Oh well, it’s better that whatever Bill Kristol would have written.

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ThinkProgress argues with the people who think Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series is ignoring creationism. He’s not saying the word, but the things he’s choosing to talk about are strongly influenced by the claims of creationists. I think this what Joseph Campbell meant by his term “invisible counterplayer”.

and let’s end with something amazing

If you’ve got the will to rock, it doesn’t matter that you only have two cellos and it’s the 18th century.

The Left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.

— Paul Ryan at CPAC, 3-6-2014

No Sift March 17

I’ll be spending the week working on the talk “Recovery From Privilege” that I’m giving Sunday at First Parish Church in Billerica, MA, and preparing to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary on Tuesday.

In other Sift news, “What Should Racism Mean?” became the third Weekly Sift post to get more than 25,000 page views. (And started another run yesterday. My thanks to the unknown Facebook bellwether who got it started.) Largely because of the new readers that post attracted, the number of people who subscribe to the Sift via WordPress went over 1,000 for the first time.

The next set of articles will appear March 24.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Russia appears set to annex Crimea, and may get away with it. On Sunday, Crimeans will vote on a referendum to join Russia. Crimea has an ethnic-Russian majority and was part of Russia until 1954. Russian and/or pro-Russian troops currently control the country, including Crimean television stations, and access to Ukrainian TV has been blocked. So the join-Russia side has a distinct advantage.

Ukraine says the referendum is illegal. Russia counters that the ouster of Ukrainian President Yanukovych (currently in Russia) and the election to replace him on May 25 are also illegal, so claims based on the Ukrainian Constitution are specious.

Some political observers are portraying this as some kind of masterstroke for Russian President Putin, but those who take a more economic view are skeptical: The Russian stock market has plunged, the ruble is down 10%, and the Russian central bank has had to raise interest rates to 7% (from and already-high 5.5%) to keep Russian currency from devaluing further. The Russian economy was not in great shape to begin with, so an interest-rate spike is likely to cause a serious recession. All that is prior to any economic sanctions that might come from the EU or the United States.

So one of the things being tested here is how much economic pain Putin is willing and able to impose on the Russian people. Maybe the surge of nationalistic pride in regaining Crimea balances that, or maybe it doesn’t.

Another consequence of Crimea leaving Ukraine would be to take a bunch of pro-Russian voters out of the Ukrainian political system, thereby guaranteeing that the remainder of Ukraine will shift towards the European Union.

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I’ve occasionally channel-scanned through the RT (Russia Today) network, and I think I’ve probably even linked to it sometime or other. Most days, it looks like just any other cable news network, and not the government-funded vehicle it is. But apparently RT has been laying it on a bit thick as the Ukrainian crisis developed, leading this American reporter to resign on the air.

You’ve got to think somebody in the production booth could have pulled the plug and didn’t. I wonder how his or her career is going.

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With the propaganda flying as thick as it is, everyone is looking for their own authentic sources on the ground. I got a comment last week from Fedor Manin, author of the Fourteen Flowers and a Manatee blog. He has translated a post “On the Brink of War” from the blog of a Russian-speaking Crimean woman, Svetlana Panina.

Please, everyone who loves Crimea, everyone who loves Russians in Crimea. Help me carry this thought through to every heart. The Russians in Crimea didn’t ask Russian soldiers to come to our homes! No one attacked us! We were living quietly and well! We were waiting for our summer guests from Russia and Ukraine, and from other countries all over the world, after all, Crimea is a gem that belongs to the whole planet.

She takes a train (with what appear to be a bunch of Ukrainian women and children escaping Crimea) from Crimea to Kiev, and reports the wild rumors flying around each place about what is happening (or about to happen) in the other.

Someone from my church has a friend in Yalta, and forwarded an email he had gotten from her. She reports that Crimean Russians, especially the older generation, are eager to join Russia and believe that the new Ukrainian government contains a neo-Nazi element that wants “to exterminate all Russians living in Ukraine”. If I believed extermination was a possibility, I’d see Putin as the Russians’ protector and support the referendum too.

All this makes me wonder about the timing of the Crimean referendum: Maybe Putin needs it to happen before the panic has a chance to settle down.

and CPAC

One media mystery is why the annual Conservative Political Action Conference gets so much national coverage, while gatherings of liberal activists (like, say, Netroots Nation) don’t. I suspect it’s that far-right activists have much more influence in the Republican Party than far-left activists have among the Democrats, but Josh Marshall offers another reason:

In recent years, especially since Obama became President, CPAC’s wild press popularity and attention has been driven by what we might call a tacit conspiracy of derp between the event organizers and the people who cover it. You be outrageous; we’ll be outraged. And everyone will be happy. (After all, crap like this doesn’t happen by accident.) This has become even more the case as the contemporary Conservative Movement has become less a matter of ideology than a sort of performance art.

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Rand Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll, getting 31% to Ted Cruz’ 11%. Paul’s vote was up from the 25% he got last year. Marco Rubio’s support collapsed from 23% last year to 6%. (Rubio made the mistake of trying to pass a law rather than just posture about ideology. His subsequent decision to oppose his own immigration bill didn’t win back his CPAC fans.) Chris Christie’s support was up to 8% (from 7% in 2013) because he’s having such a good year.

To understand the significance of Paul’s victory, I looked up the 2010 CPAC straw poll: Rand’s Dad Ron Paul also got 31% (to Mitt Romney’s 22%), and as we all know, went on to win the 2012 Republican nomination and become president.

I’m trying not to obsess about 2016 already, but I will say this: Rand Paul is not a threat. Put him on a debate stage and Ted Cruz will eat his lunch. Rand just isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, or as his Dad was. He hasn’t really thought through the implications of his libertarian beliefs. And that gets him sidetracked into arguments he can’t win, like defending a restauranteur’s right to run a segregated lunch counter.

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Paul Ryan only managed 3% in the straw poll, but he was responsible for the video clip liberals most love to hate, which has got to count for something.

What [the Left is] offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. … This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. … She once met a young boy from a very poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag, just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the Left doesn’t understand. … People don’t just want a life of comfort, they want a life of dignity.

Never mind that the story is mis-attributed. (Chris Hayes interviews the woman who really played the Eloise role.) Or that key elements have been fudged. (The government wasn’t involved.) That’s in the fine tradition of Ronald Reagan and John McCain. Expecting politicians to check their touching anecdotes is like expecting Bostonians to stop at red lights when there’s no traffic.

Liberals around the country objected to an implication that may or may not have been there: that poor kids don’t have parents who care about them.

A better objection is that this is the usual conservative sleight-of-hand: It makes the Best the enemy of the Good, as if the Best will appear by magic as soon as the Good is eliminated. Specifically, how is emptying stomachs going to fill souls?

If that imagined child doesn’t already have a caring parent, how is taking away his lunch going to give him one? It’s like when  Newt Gingrich said “the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Taking away someone’s food stamps isn’t going to get her a job. So yes, people want lives of dignity — liberals understand that quite well. But we also understand that inflicting discomfort on them is not going to help them get it.

Ryan is also performing a second standard conservative sleight-of-hand: severing the moral connection between the people who pay taxes and the people who receive benefits. Free school lunches exist because Americans do care about poor kids. The government isn’t some soulless black hole that sucks up taxes in one universe and regurgitates benefits in another. The government is a structure through which We the People manifest our desire to help each other.

So if Eloise actually had met such a boy, here’s what she should have said: “You have this lunch because people do care about you. All over the country, people have pictured kids like you going without a lunch and decided they want to pay taxes so that you won’t have to be hungry. I pay taxes, and let me tell you, this is exactly what I had in mind.”

and you also might be interested in …

Edwin Lyngar posted a touching article “I Lost My Dad to Fox News” on Salon.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it.

What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. … I do not blame or condemn my father for his opinions. If you consumed a daily diet of right-wing fury, erroneously labeled “news,” you could very likely end up in the same place. … To some people the idea of retirees yelling at the television all day may seem funny, but this isn’t a joke. We’re losing the nation’s grandparents, and it’s an American tragedy.

A less extreme version of the same thing happened to my parents in their 80s. They continued to identify as New Deal Democrats and knew Fox was slanted, but for some reason they watched anyway. CNN bored them, MSNBC wasn’t part of basic cable, and they found hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity reassuring and comfortable. I think even if MSNBC had been an option, Chris Hayes and Steve Kornacki would have seemed like smart-alec kids to them, and I doubt they’d have gotten past their surface impressions of an intense black woman like Melissa Harris-Perry or an unrepentant lesbian like Rachel Maddow.

If you are old and white, Fox News may produce long-term anxiety, but it sneaks up on you. The immediate optics of MSNBC are far more challenging, and my parents watched cable news for companionship, not challenge.

Fox never changed my parents’ philosophy, but little-by-little it shaped their perceptions. They wondered why the Democrats couldn’t find any good leaders — not realizing that everything they saw about Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Joe Biden was selected and edited to make them look silly and unappealing. They wondered why President Obama always emphasized the wrong issues and couldn’t come up with any persuasive messages — never able to compensate for the fact that they only saw Obama through the eyes of his enemies. The important issues — the ACORN videos, the Tea Party protests, ObamaCare’s death panels — left Democrats with nothing much to say. And what made today’s liberals so hostile to Christianity?

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The New Hampshire’s Republican-majority Senate finally accepted a plan to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. According to The Concord Monitor:

The bill goes next to the House Finance Committee on Monday. The Democratic majority there is supportive of the bill, as is Gov. Maggie Hassan

I’m sure our minimum-wage workers and our hospital administrators are breathing easier. If we get this done, and if the plan of Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett passes, then Maine will be the only holdout in the Northeast. Campaign on that, Gov. LePage.

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It will soon no longer be a felony for married couples to have oral or anal sex in Virginia.

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The Daily Show’s Aasiv Mandvi destroys the claim that “America has the best health care system in the world.”

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Not everyone who agrees with Ayn Rand’s politics is a sociopath, but the underlying worldview is sociopathic.

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For those of you waiting for Game of Thrones to get going again, here’s where the Dothraki language came from.

and let’s end with something funny

Jimmy Kimmel puts together the National Teachers’ Day message a lot of teachers probably wish they could send the country.

It may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of [negro] blood should be confined to the inferior caste.

— Justice William Harper of the South Carolina Supreme Court
State v. Cantey (1835)

This week’s featured post is “Are You Sure You’re White?“, a review of Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line: a secret history of race in America.

This week everybody was talking about the Ukraine

As I’ve said before, a one-man blog is not the ideal operation for covering breaking news, so I mostly don’t try. But the wall of fire during the Kiev protests was impossible to ignore.

And when Olympic skier Bogdana Matsotska left Sochi intending to join the protests, she raised even more attention.

By Saturday, President Viktor Yanukovych had been voted out of office and left the capital. New elections are planned for May. For the moment it looks like the good guys have won, but as we saw with the Arab Spring demonstrations in Egypt, it’s hard to turn street protests into a functioning democracy. Best of luck to the Ukrainians.

ThinkProgress provides background on what this was all about.

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BuzzFeed reports that the Yanukovych government had been trying to buy favorable coverage from right-wing blogs. This fits the pattern I discussed in “Keeping the Con in Conservatism“.

For the record, I received no money to mention Ukraine in this post.

and (oddly) not Venezuela

A new reader pinged me with his hope that I’ll explain what’s going on in Venezuela, which left me too embarrassed to say “Is something going on in Venezuela?” It weird how little coverage this is getting.

As in Kiev, there are massive street protests in Caracas. Here’s some background from BuzzFeed. And the latest from Reuters.

The current president, Nicolás Maduro, has been in office ten months after succeeding the late Hugo Chavez.

and Ted Nugent

I try to stay away from the outrage-of-the-week, but this week I failed. The front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor in Texas campaigned with Ted Nugent, who recently called President Obama a “subhuman mongrel“, a phrase that had more zing in the original German. (Subhuman is untermenschen and mongrel is mischling.)

Nugent is a clown who doesn’t deserve my attention or yours, but a state attorney general and potential governor of Texas is another matter. Wolf Blitzer (who is Jewish and knows how the phrase translates to German) reacted with as much reserve as he could muster:

Shockingly, Abbott’s campaign brushed aside the criticism, saying they value Nugent’s commitment to the second amendment issuing a statement, “Ted Nugent is a forceful advocate for individual liberty and constitutional rights, especially the second amendment rights cherished by Texans. While he may sometimes say things or use language that Greg Abbott would not endorse or agree with, we appreciate the support of everyone who supports protecting our constitution.”

The incident raised the question of whether there is any criticism of Obama that conservatives will denounce, or any right-wing personality who is too hateful to associate with. Fortunately, Rand Paul and John McCain decided the line had been crossed. But it was sad to watch Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and other Republicans dance around a clear condemnation.

If anybody wants to do a liberals-do-it-too comment, start with who the Ted Nugent equivalent is and what they said that equals “subhuman mongrel”. Then find me a Democrat as highly placed as Greg Abbott who campaigned with them.

and a raft of discrimination-against-gays-is-OK bills

A bunch of states are passing laws to meet the “religious freedom” needs of people whose God demands that they treat gays badly. The most extreme is Arizona, where Governor Brewer is weighing whether or not to sign the bill. (The business community is against it, perhaps fearing another boycott similar to what happened after Arizona passed its anti-immigrant law.) But similar bills are being debated in Ohio, Mississippi, Idaho, South Dakota, Tennessee, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The text is here. It’s short and sweeping, and does not directly mention gays at all. The key section is:

A person that asserts a violation of this section must establish all of the following:

1. That the person’s action or refusal to act is motivated by a religious belief.

2. That the person’s religious belief is sincerely held.

3. That the state action substantially burdens the exercise of the person’s religious belief.

“State action” has been expanded to mean a court’s enforcement a civil rights claim. Proponents are trying to fix what they see as the injustice of a New Mexico case, in which a photographer was sued and lost after refusing to deal with a gay couple.

Reading the Arizona law, I fail to see why it wouldn’t apply to a restaurant owner who wanted to turn away black people, if his white supremacism were religiously based. (There are certainly churches you can join if you want to claim that right.) And even if I’m missing some legal distinction, I don’t see the moral distinction. The only justification I can see for separating the anti-gay bigot from the anti-black bigot is to argue that religious white supremacism is wrong, but religious rejection of homosexuality isn’t. And I don’t think the government should be empowered to decide whose religion is true.

In the larger view, I’ve stated my opinion before: I think this is all passive aggression. No one sincerely believes that his or her immortal soul is imperiled by taking pictures of gay couples or putting two grooms on the top of a wedding cake. It’s an exaggerated sensitivity invented to control the actions of others and justify acts of bigotry.

and looked back at the stimulus

It’s been five years since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law, so it was time to restart the argument about what it accomplished.

The point hardly anybody appreciates is that when you combine state and federal spending, there was no stimulus. Federal spending just replaced state cutbacks. The graph below shows the number of employees at all levels of government. (The blip in 2010 is temporary workers for the census. You can find a similar blip during the previous census in 2000.)

Overall, federal employment has been down slightly during the Obama years. State and local employment dropped drastically when the recession hit, and would have fallen much further if not for money in the stimulus that went to the states. People ask: “Where are the jobs from the stimulus?” A lot of them are the teachers, police, firefighters, and nurses who didn’t get laid off.

So the main thing the stimulus did was prevent a massive deflationary cut in government, like what happened so disastrously in Europe.

but I’m still thinking about racism

“What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” became the fifth post in Weekly Sift history to go over 10,000 page views. Last I checked, it had over 19,000, which made it the fourth-most-popular Sift post ever.

It’s been drawing a number of comments, including objections, which I’ve been trying to answer as best I can.

Here’s the thing that has struck me in the negative comments. It would be entirely possible to look at the examples I gave (of President Obama and his family being denounced for things previous presidents have done without incident) and say: “Yeah, there is a small group of racially motivated folks who claim to be conservatives so that they can attack the black president, but that’s not really who we are. Real conservatives have plenty of legitimate objections to Obama and don’t have to stoop to this stuff.”

Instead, many commenters identify with anyone criticizing Obama for whatever reason and circle the wagons around them. As a result, it becomes easier to paint all conservatives as racists, which is not at all what I claimed.

This week I continued to focus on race in Are You Sure You’re White?, a review of Daniel Sharfstein’s The Invisible Line. I also ran across this great video illustrating the implicit bias I talked about last week.

In a hidden-camera experiment, three young people try to steal a bicycle in a well-traveled public park. The young white man draws a few questions but no one makes a serious effort to stop him or call the police. The young black man draws a crowd and the police are called. But most hilarious is what happens to the young white woman: Men stop to help her. That poor girl, she’ll never saw through that chain on her own.

Here’s a similar hidden-camera test where black and white men try to steal a car in broad daylight.

and you also might be interested in …

This 99-year-old Bulgarian spends every day on the street begging, but not for himself.

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I love Rachel Maddow, but I have to agree with Bill Maher in this conversation when Rachel was a guest on his show: MSNBC is over-covering the Chris Christie scandal. Like Bill, I think BridgeGate is a legitimate scandal and I want to get to the bottom of it, but there’s not a whole segment (or more) worth of new developments every night.

I regularly tune in to Rachel’s show or Chris Hayes’ or Steve Kornacki’s , but these days I often think “Jesus, not this again.” Partly it’s the generic cable-news tendency to over-hype stories and try to get us hooked on every new detail. And I’m willing to be convinced that Rachel is accurate when she says that she covered Democratic governor Rob Blagojevich’s scandal just as intensely. But I found Blago’s villainy more amusing, and even so, I remember getting sick of that story too.

If you are similarly ignoring MSNBC and/or Bridgegate these days, I’ll let you know when something important happens.

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Salon’s Brian Beutler blows up another ObamaCare horror story, and then suggests the obvious question:

I know the right is heavily invested not just in ignoring Obamacare success stories, but in cultivating the very horror stories they then use to attack the law. This, at least, doesn’t appear to be a case of the latter. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the Affordable Care Act has really left some people in categorically horrible situations. Given the numbers involved, I’d be pretty surprised if such people didn’t exist. But at some point it’s worth asking whether the apparent difficulty conservatives have finding them suggests that maybe the law isn’t wreaking all the devastation they want you to believe it is.

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Wonder why other countries have faster, cheaper internet? Big cable companies like the proposed Comcast/Time-Warner monolith, and an FCC that caters to them.

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Michael Sam won’t be the first openly gay player in a major American professional sport after all. The Brooklyn Nets picked up Jason Collins’ contract, and he played briefly Sunday. ESPN New York reports how strangely normal it all was.

Sure there was applause, and a few folks who stood up to recognize the magnitude of the moment, but if you didn’t know what was happening, you really would’ve had no idea something historic had just happened.

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Economist Jared Bernstein challenges the idea that jobs are going unfilled because Americans aren’t trained for them.

When you hear employers complaining about how they can’t find the skilled workers they need, remember to plug in the unstated second part of the sentence, “…at the wage I’m willing to pay.”

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Atlantic’s Garrett Epps points out that the Hobby Lobby case is open-and-shut if the Supreme Court follows its own precedents:

If so, Hobby Lobby and the other challengers don’t even get out of the starting gate. The Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts Courts have all been clear: These plaintiffs have not suffered any injury worthy of redress under the Constitution.

However, that’s not how this Court’s conservative majority behaves. Witness the ObamaCare decision of 2012. In prior cases, the Commerce Clause clearly allowed such laws; constitutionality was not even seriously discussed when the law was being passed. But magically, a new legal theory appeared just in time to disallow the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, and five Supreme Court justices signed on to that brand new interpretation. Chief Justice Roberts had to find a different justification to avoid invalidating the law completely.

Maybe the same thing will happen here. Law isn’t supposed to be suspenseful like this.

and let’s end with something fun

I never knew NBC’s Brian Williams did a cover of “Rapper’s Delight”. (Compare to the original.)