The Weekly Sift

They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me it seems quite clear
That it’s all just little bits of history repeating.

— “History Repeating” by Alex Gifford
performed by The Propellerheads/Shirley Bassey (1997)

Understanding today’s right-wing insurgency as a new phenomenon only weakens our attempts to defeat it. Grasping it instead as the product of a slow, steady evolution is our only hope of stopping the cycle before it repeats itself anew.

— Rick Perlstein “The Grand Old Tea Party” (2013)

This week’s featured post: The ObamaCare Panic.

This week everybody was panicking about ObamaCare

The discouraging thing wasn’t that conservatives were pushing bogus horror stories, or even that the mainstream media wasn’t debunking them. It’s that Democrats began wilting under the pressure, just like they did before the Iraq invasion or when the fraudulent ACORN-pimp-video came out.

It sucks to have to defend people too spineless to defend themselves, but here goes: The ObamaCare Panic.

and talking about journalists who ought to be fired

As I mentioned last week, Laura Logan of CBS’ 60 Minutes has apologized on-the-air for her Benghazi report on October 27. But it was content-free apology that made no attempt to undo the damage. I agree with Josh Marshall’s assessment:

In a narrow sense, Lara Logan did say she was “sorry.” But the entire 90 seconds was aimed at obfuscating what happened.

Logan said 60 Minutes had found out Thursday that they had been “misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report.”

Include him in their report? He was the report. And even in conceding that her team had been “misled”, Logan tiptoed around the real news, which is that it seems clear that Davies’ entire story was a fabrication. He wasn’t there. So none of the stuff he [claimed to have done] could have happened and he cannot have witnessed any of what he claimed to describe.

So if you’re a 60 Minutes viewer, you saw a full segment on Benghazi that re-ignited a bunch of Fox News talking points. (Fox certainly saw it that way, mentioning the report on 13 segments totaling 47 minutes.) Then two weeks later — after you and your buddies at work had plenty of time to hash that out over the water cooler — you saw 90 seconds at the end of the hour indicating that not everything in that segment was completely correct.

A lot of people have compared this episode to the Bush National Guard report that ended Dan Rather’s career at CBS and got a few other people fired. But Rather outraged conservatives, not liberals, so the cases are completely different.

Another person who should maybe retire early is Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He landed in a kettle of hot water by pointing out last Monday that the Republican Iowa-caucus or South-Carolina-primary voters Chris Christie might need to impress are a little different than the New Jersey general electorate that gave him a landslide victory. Such folks are “not racist”, Cohen assures us, they’re just different from East-Coasters:

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children.

I can’t improve on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ response:

The problem here isn’t that we think Richard Cohen gags at the sight of an interracial couple and their children. The problem is that Richard Cohen thinks being repulsed isn’t actually racist, but “conventional” or “culturally conservative.” Obstructing the right of black humans and white humans to form families is a central feature of American racism. If retching at the thought of that right being exercised isn’t racism, then there is no racism.

In deciding whether or not it’s time for Cohen to go, I hope the Post looks at the broader sweep of his columns. In addition to the column in question, here are the last month’s worth:

On November 4, Cohen discussed how watching 12 Years a Slave was an “unlearning” experience for him. Turns out, Gone With the Wind wasn’t a documentary and slavery was really bad! Who knew?

October 28, he connected the problems of HealthCare.gov to the administration’s “inept” and “incoherent” Syria policy (which appears to be getting rid of Assad’s chemical-weapon arsenal without war), the bugging of the German chancellor’s phone, and the souring of U.S.-Saudi relations, and concluded that President Obama’s may not be as competent as Cohen had thought. It took a whole column to say that, and if you can find any more content than I just put into one sentence, please tell me.

October 21, he realized (four months late) that maybe his original assessment that Edward Snowden “expose[d] programs that were known to our elected officials and could have been deduced by anyone who has ever Googled anything” wasn’t quite right. Ah, the shifting winds of conventional wisdom!

That’s a month’s worth of work in one of the most prestigious jobs in American journalism. I’m reminded of a Rodney Dangerfield joke: When a woman wants to break up with him, Rodney asks her, “Is there someone else?” And she replies, “There must be.”

and 2016

I’m going to break my moratorium on 2016 speculation for The New Republic‘s “Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren“. Noam Scheiber is making an analogy between Hillary Clinton’s front-runner status now and her similar position in the 2008 cycle. Then, a successful insurgency was possible because she was on the wrong side of the Iraq issue. Now she’s too aligned with the 1% and Wall Street, which makes her vulnerable to a challenge from somebody on the progressive side of that issue, like Elizabeth Warren.

I agree with Scheiber’s scenario this far:

• I love Elizabeth Warren. If the gods let me appoint the president, she’d be high on my list.
• Along with his continuation of Bush’s war on terror. Obama’s Wall-Street-friendly policies have been the most disappointing part of his presidency. No Democrat is chummier with Wall Street than the Clintons, and nobody is in a better position than Warren to press that issue.
• A lot of Democratic women (especially older women) felt robbed when Hillary was denied the 2008 nomination by a man. If that happens again I think we’ll have a problem. So (as much as I also like Sherrod Brown) the 2016 not-Clinton Democrat ought to be a woman.

So yeah, there’s logic behind the Warren-excites-the-base-and-beats-Clinton scenario. But I’m not buying it for these reasons:

• Obama barely beat Clinton in 2008. There’s no room for error.
• Warren is not the campaigner Obama was. As good as her policies would be for the working class, her professorial style is not going to inspire WalMart Democrats.
• Obama didn’t just rally the progressive base, he excited new voters among blacks, Hispanics, and the young. Clinton might be vulnerable among younger voters and the Occupy-types love Warren, but I don’t see Warren inheriting the non-ideological parts of the Obama coalition.
• In 2008 Clinton was pinned down by her undeniable vote to authorize the Iraq invasion. But in the 2016 primaries she has lots of room to slide left on economic issues. Like Romney’s rightward slide in 2012, Clinton’s leftward shift won’t be entirely believable. But it should be enough to fend off a progressive challenge.

At some point in the cycle the press will be hungry for a Clinton-is-not-inevitable story, so somebody (maybe Warren) will be cast as the progressive savior. But I expect that boomlet to fade.

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The most insightful article I saw this week was Michael Kimmel’s “America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy” on Salon. He studies white supremacists and finds that they are literally disinherited: They are the “& Son” from the business that went under, or the would-have-been heir to the bankrupt family farm.

They wind up with a worldview full of contradictions: Pro-capitalist but anti-corporate, rabidly patriotic  but “the America they love doesn’t happen to be the America in which they live.”

For ordinary white conservatives, class is a proxy for race. (“Welfare queens”, the “inner city poor” … we know who they are, right?) But among the white supremacists, race is a proxy for class. “Whites” are the people who actually make stuff (that the government collects and gives away to non-whites), not the bankers and lawyers and bureaucrats and intellectuals (even though most of those people are actually white).

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They’re every white guy who believed that this land was his land, was made for you and me. … But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

Eventually I’ll probably write something about all the Weimar Republic stuff I’ve been reading lately, but for now I’ll just say that the parallels are striking. In Germany of the 1920s, the “rich Jew” and “Jewish banker” stereotypes channeled class resentment into anti-semitism. It wasn’t “real” Germans who were oppressing the working class, it was “Jews”.

Ever feel like you need an expert panel to determine what’s racist and what isn’t? The Daily Show assembled one.

Ted Cruz’s Dad turns out to be a minister who is way wackier than Jeremiah Wright. If Cruz runs for president, will he face the same kind of pressure to disassociate that President Obama did? Somehow I doubt it.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains why he now believes the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

As the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination approaches, you can expect more conservative efforts to claim that Kennedy was really one of theirs. But here’s what conservatives thought about him at the time. The following flier was being posted in Dallas prior to the President’s fateful visit:

The parallels to President Obama are obvious, right down to attempts to expand health care. Let’s hope things turn out differently this time.

The revolving door keeps spinning: Ex-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner becomes president of a Wall Street buy-out firm. I have no reason to believe this is anything other than perfectly legal and above-board, i.e., no quid pro quo for favors granted. But how could the pipeline from Washington to Wall Street not be a corrupting influence?

And let’s end with something amazing

What a spider looks like when you get really, really close.

I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy. You know what? The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.

— John Kasich, Republican Governor of Ohio
The New York Times, 10-28-2013

The dual process of cutting both taxes and social programs involved, however, a striking difference in the assumptions of the motivations governing the behavior of the affluent and of the poor. For those in the upper brackets, and for those managing corporate decision-making processes, the underlying assumption of the tax cuts was that the creation of new tax incentives would encourage more work, more investment, and more savings, that the best way to achieve sought-after behavior is to reward it, in this case with lowered tax rates on corporations, savings, executive stock options, and estates. At the bottom of the scale, the dominant assumption behind social program cuts was precisely the opposite: the best way to achieve increased work is by making life tougher.

— Thomas Byrne Edsall
The New Politics of Inequality (1984)

A shorter summary of the policy-set Edsall is describing: Carrots for the rich. Sticks for the poor.

This week’s featured post: “The Filibuster and the War on Women“

This week everybody was talking about ObamaCare

The focus of Republican attacks shifted from HealthCare.gov to people whose policies got cancelled.

A lot of the media is reporting these cases without examining them. The few who do invariably notice the same things. Either

• the cancelled policy is what Consumer Reports has called “junk insurance”. A low annual cap or the insurance company’s option to cancel if you actually get sick means that the policy really just provides the illusion of health insurance. In addition to the 50-million-or-so uninsured Americans pre-ObamaCare, about 25 million had insurance that would not have saved them from bankruptcy if they had a major health problem.
• or, a better policy (typically, but not always) for less money is available on the ObamaCare exchanges.

There are exceptions, but here’s the overall picture:

Nicholas Kristof reminds us of the real victims of our healthcare system: People who will die because they couldn’t get affordable health insurance. They’re not just abstract public-health statistics. They have names and stories. As Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker:

when it comes to evaluating the worth of Obamacare we may not remember the Web-site hiccups all that well. What we will remember, and what ultimately matters, is whether, in the next year, the A.C.A. fulfills its promise: to provide affordable health insurance to people who did not have it through an employer, could not afford it on their own, were denied it on the basis of preëxisting conditions, paid more for it than they should have because they were, say, women of child-bearing age, or could no longer get by because their insurance benefits had been capped.

A new poll shows why the “replace” part of the Republican slogan to “repeal and replace ObamaCare” will never happen: Republicans don’t want a replacement. Among Republicans, repeal-and-don’t-replace beats repeal-and-replace 42%-29%.

and the LAX shooting

Notice how closely the coverage tracks Juan Cole’s 2012 “Top Ten Differences Between White Terrorists and Others“. I don’t want to make too much of the early hints that this guy is a right-wing wacko, but if he were a dark-skinned Muslim with similar hints of radical Islamist views, that would be the whole story.

and food stamp cuts

The Food Stamp program became less generous on November 1, when a benefit increase that was part of the 2009 stimulus program expired. Eligibility standards don’t change, but families will get about 5% less help.

I have trouble getting excited about the expiration of a temporary program, but further food stamp cuts are on the docket. The current budget negotiations are supposed to reconcile the Senate’s $4-billion-over-ten-years cut with the House’s $40-billion-over-ten-years cut. About $76 billion was spent on food stamps this year.

The problem of scale: “Lawmakers could save millions by targeting food stamp fraud — will they?” says the Fox News headline. Millions? Those who keep reading will find this acknowledgement: “The amount appears relatively small considering the government pays out roughly $70 billion in annual food stamps benefits.”

Hmmm. I wonder if those “millions” are net savings, after accounting for the cost of implementing and enforcing whatever safeguards would prevent that relatively small amount of fraud. Fox doesn’t link to the report the number comes from — I think it’s this one, although an automatic text search fails to find the $3.7 million figure in it — but it looks like they’re talking about gross savings, estimated by a suspiciously simplistic method.

The projected potential savings from fraud-cutting is detailed in the inspector general report, which found $3.7 million in questionable monthly payouts across 10 states. … The $222 million figure was reached by multiplying the number by 12 to get an annual amount, then by five to get an estimate for all 50 states.

So on the bottom line, the headline “millions” in savings are probably considerably less than the article claims, and may even be negative.

and the NSA

Strangely, people who are OK with the NSA spying on you and me hit their limit when it was revealed that the NSA is spying on our allies.

and the Republican Civil War

The opening quote from Governor Kasich is a Republican-on-Republican attack, as Kasich struggles to govern in spite of his Republican legislature. Anybody who thinks President Obama could get along with the Right if he were only nicer to them should study Kasich, who was a Fox News host for six years.

People you never would have thought could be challenged from the Right are in danger of being challenged from the Right. The latest is Senator John Cornyn of Texas. A poll of Texas Republicans found that “a Tea Party candidate” beats Cornyn 46%-33%, though several specific challengers are less popular. (Cornyn beats Rep. Louis Gohmert 45%-20%.) You have to wonder about the poll, because the wording of some  questions seems biased, like “Do you support amnesty for illegal aliens?” But the horse-race questions look legit.

The craziest name suggested as a Cornyn challenger is fake historian David Barton. Barton’s latest book, The Jefferson Lies, was withdrawn by the publisher, because “There were historical details — matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.” Barton’s misrepresentations of American history figure prominently in Chris Rodda’s debunking book Liars for Jesus.

And here’s a future civil-war battleground:

and the filibuster and court rulings about abortion and contraception

I covered this in “The Filibuster and the War on Women“.

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Nature giveth and nature taketh away.

You know who couldn’t get a Texas voter ID on his first try? Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright. His driver’s license had expired (which is probably a good thing, given that he’s 90) and his faculty ID from TCU isn’t one of the forms of ID accepted. (If he’d had a gun license, though, he’d have been fine. Let’s hope that’s expired too.) Fortunately, he could go home and find his birth certificate, which not all 90-year-olds can do.

The point of the law isn’t to verify who you are — Wright did that the first time — it’s to make it harder to vote. There’s no evidence of a voter-impersonation problem in Texas or anywhere else. And there’s really no evidence for a forged-ID-to-enable-voter-impersonation problem.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) announced Thursday that Syria

has completed the functional destruction of critical equipment for all of its declared chemical weapons production facilities and mixing/filling plants, rendering them inoperable.

… The next milestone for the mission will be 15 November, by which time the Executive Council must approve a detailed plan of destruction submitted by Syria to eliminate its chemical weapons stockpile.

I still can’t decide whether I want to see the Ender’s Game movie. But there’s no denying how far Orson Scott Card has gone off the rails. It’s not just the gay-marriage-justifies-revolution screed (“when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary. … Biological imperatives trump laws.”), it’s this “plausible” scenario for Obama making himself dictator-for-life.

Interesting re-interpretation of the novel on Salon: It’s not really about war or genocide, it’s “an imaginative portrait of the inner life of an abused child, a fledgling psyche trying to reconcile the unbearable contradiction in receiving both love and gratuitous pain from the same source.”

Abstract ideas have consequences. According to Scientific American, believing in Satan and the existence of pure evil affects views on a number of political issues.

BPE [belief in pure evil] predicts such effects as: harsher punishments for crimes (e.g. murder, assault, theft), stronger reported support for the death penalty, and decreased support for criminal rehabilitation. Follow-up studies corroborate these findings, showing that BPE also predicts the degree to which participants perceive the world to be dangerous and vile, the perceived need for preemptive military aggression to solve conflicts, and reported support for torture.

I’d love to see research on my hypothesis connecting BPE to conspiracy theories. This is from the 2010 Weekly Sift article “Propaganda Lessons from the Religious Right“:

The Devil is the ultimate sinister conspirator, motivated by pure evil. Once you have a Devil, it follows without evidence that there is a conspiracy against anything true and good and right. How could there not be? The Devil is against it, and unless he has suddenly lost his innate cleverness and his characteristic ability to lie and tempt and cajole, he will have followers.

So if you are arguing in front of a Devil-postulating audience, you don’t have prove that there is a conspiracy against the Good — of course there is — you only have to identify that conspiracy. The Manichean frame (God/Devil, Good/Evil) is sitting there, waiting for you to connect yourself with Light and your opponent with Darkness.

This is the kind of thing that gives Congress a bad image: Part of the deal to end the shutdown/debt-ceiling standoff was to have a later vote on a “resolution to disapprove” of the debt-ceiling hike. That resolution was voted on in the Senate Tuesday, and lost on a party-line vote.

Here’s the ridiculous part: 27 Republican senators who voted to “disapprove” also voted for the deal they’re disapproving of. So, did the Devil make them cast that vote?

In five years, copyrights from the 1920s will start expiring, as they would have long ago if Disney and other copyright-owning corporations didn’t keep lobbying for extensions.

Extending copyrights on existing works is a pure corruption issue: There’s no public interest whatsoever in preventing Mickey Mouse and Batman from entering the public domain the way older cultural icons like Sherlock Holmes and Scrooge did long ago. Copyrights are supposed to be incentives for creators, but as Lawrence Lessig puts it: “No matter what the US Congress does with current law, George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.”

The big money is already gearing up to buy another act of Congress. But there’s an internet and a blogosphere this time around, so they’ll have to buy their legislation in full public view.

American neighborhoods are getting more economically stratified.

Using U.S. Census data from 1970-2000 and American Community Survey data from 2005-2011, Cornell’s Kendra Bischoff and Stanford’s Sean F. Reardon found that more people are living in extremely high income areas or low income areas, while fewer are living in areas characterized as middle-income.

Kevin Drum annotates the chart:

This is yet another sign of the collapse of the American middle class, and it’s a bad omen for the American political system. We increasingly lack a shared culture or shared experiences, and that makes democracy a tough act to pull off. The well-off have less and less interaction with the poor outside of the market economy, and less and less empathy for how they live their lives. For too many of us, the “general welfare” these days is just an academic abstraction, not a lived experience.

and finally, something too good not to use

Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke get Attenborrowed.

WILLARD: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
KURTZ: Are my methods unsound?
WILLARD: I don’t see any method at all, sir.

— Apocalypse Now (1979)
quoted Saturday by Ross Douthat, “The Kurtz Republicans“

This week’s featured post: “Don’t Means-Test Medicare“. Because the first step in gutting a program is to get the rich people out of it.

This week everybody was talking about a possible end to the shutdown/debt-ceiling crisis

Little by little, the Republicans are realizing that the shutdown battle isn’t Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it’s “The Ransom of Red Chief“. The longer this hostage crisis goes on, the more painful it is for them.

Wednesday Gallup showed the Republican Party with a 28% approval rating, down ten points from the previous month, and even lower than the 31% nadir they hit during the Clinton impeachment. Thursday, an NBC/WSJ poll said that the public blames them for the shutdown (53%-31%), while both President Obama and the Affordable Care Act have become more popular. The public says (47%-39%) that it wants to see a Democratic Congress in 2014.  To me, the most damaging result was Question 16. Asked whether President Obama was being a strong leader or putting politics ahead of what’s good for the country, the public was mildly negative (46%-51%). But the same question about congressional Republicans produced a landslide: 70% said Republicans were putting politics first.

The business community has also been weighing in against them. On shutdown eve, a coalition of 251 trade associations (including big Republican donor, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) sent a letter to Congress:

It is not in the best interest of the employers, employees or the American people to risk a government shutdown that will be economically disruptive and create even more uncertainties for the U.S. economy.

Likewise, we respectfully urge the Congress to raise the debt ceiling in a timely manner and remove any threat to the full faith and credit of the United States government.

Thursday, the head of the American Bankers Association (former Republican governor Frank Keating) framed the debt ceiling issue the way Democrats do:

Failing to raise the debt ceiling in time would be an unprecedented mistake. … To use a credit card analogy, the decision about what to buy on credit tomorrow must take into account the debt we already owe, but that is never an excuse for not paying the current bill on time and in full.

Even the Koch brothers started pulling back (after spending an estimated quarter-billion dollars on groups that promoted this crisis). Wednesday Koch Industries sent a letter to all senators denying that they had a position on the shutdown.

The stock market never did crash, exactly, but the Dow slid from a mid-September high of 15709 to 14727 Wednesday morning. That’s when rumors started that the Republicans were going lower their ransom demands (as Red Chief’s captors did shortly before realizing how bad a situation they were in). Sure enough, defunding ObamaCare wasn’t in the demand list any more. (Aside: Doing the research on this topic is frustrating, because news articles often leave out the most important details, like what was actually proposed.)

But the idea of ransom wasn’t gone. In exchange for a six-week extension on the debt ceiling (and not re-opening the government), Ryan wanted to replace the sequester cuts (which originally were designed to be equally offensive to both parties, but which the Republicans are happier about than the Democrats) with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. So: we’ll let the hostages live another six weeks if you give us something.

President Obama wasn’t interested. Then over the weekend the Senate tried to work something out, again with smaller ransom demands. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) proposed to extend the debt ceiling through January and fund the government through March. In exchange she wants some lesser changes to ObamaCare (repealing or delaying the medical device tax, plus making some changes to eligibility which I can’t find spelled out anywhere).

The problem here is that that new sequester cuts go into effect in January. What the Democrats hoped to accomplish in budget negotiations was to avoid some of those cuts. That’s why the continuing resolutions they supported accepted Republican-supported spending levels, but ended before January 1. Senate Democrats view a CR that lasts until March as a concession. And what they get in exchange for that concession is to let the Republicans out of the box they voluntarily got into.

So Senate Democrats rejected that deal and proposed a clean debt-ceiling extension until after the 2014 elections, which the Republicans filibustered. Since then, stuff has been happening behind closed doors and who knows what it means. In general, the Democrats are united while the Republicans are fragmented. That makes the Republicans hard to negotiate with, because who knows what any particular leader can deliver? (The weirdest story I’ve heard is that when Senate Republicans came to the White House, they had to ask Obama what the House Republicans had proposed.)

The stock market seems edgy (down 75 when I last checked) but not panicking. Debt-ceiling disaster is scheduled for Thursday. Conservatives are still telling each other than “Obama will blink” if they push this to the edge.

As has been true from the beginning, the pundits keep telling us something will work out, but they’re not sure what the deal will be and they have no scenario in mind for how it happens. I’m making no predictions. When you push important stuff off to the last minute, sometimes it doesn’t get done, even if you really intended to do it.

The funniest commentary on the shutdown came from The Daily Show’s Jason Jones. He decided to take the ransom metaphor literally and seek advice from a professional hostage negotiator. Why do people take hostages? Jones asks.

Negotiator: In their world, they’ve tried a lot of other things, and everything they’ve tried up to that point has failed. They view themselves as extremely significant people, so they’re mystified that they’re not being followed more. And they’re hurt by it and they feel very abandoned by it.

Jones: You know, I thought calling in a hostage negotiator would kind of be funny, a funny joke, but it’s kind of incredible how this metaphor is lining up.

Negotiator: Even batshit insane has its own rules.

and trying to understand Republicans

Fascinating look at the Republican rank-and-file (summary, full 30-page report — which is worth reading if you’ve got the time). A liberal group, Democracy Corps, ran focus groups of like-minded Republicans of three types: Evangelicals, Tea Partiers, and moderates. (I find this interesting in view of my post The Four Flavors of Republican from January, 2012. Democracy Corps’ groups seem to correspond to my theocrats, libertarians, and corporatists. The NeoCons are nowhere to be found. I wonder whether they are a beltway phenomenon with little grass-roots support, or if DC just didn’t raise foreign-policy issues.)

My takeaways: Tea Partiers and Evangelicals together make a majority of Republicans, and while they disagree on the importance of social issues, they share an apocalyptic feeling that the country may slip away from them for good unless they take drastic action now. They’re scary that way.

The role of race is interesting. The point of like-minded focus groups was to get people saying things they wouldn’t say in mixed circles. So DC expected the occasional racist remark or slur, which didn’t happen; there was no explicit racial hostility. But the America Republicans are nostalgic for and feel in danger of losing is clearly a white America. As an Evangelical man from Roanoke put it:

It’s a little bubble. So everybody – it’s like a Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogenous.

In many of the comments, blacks and Hispanics are not villains so much as pawns in the liberal plot to create pliable voting majorities by extending dependence on government. As Bloomberg’s Francis Wilkinson summarized:

Obama has extended a new entitlement to create a class of lazy, poor voters whose well-being is dependent upon the Democratic Party.

Moderates are about a quarter of Republicans. They know they don’t fit any more but can’t see themselves as Democrats. They’re pro-business and anti-regulation, but they’re also open to gay rights, admiring of science, and convinced that government only works if everyone compromises for the greater good. The current Tea/Evangelical Republican Party embarrasses them. They might well agree with Ross Douthat:

there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever.

A Methodist pastor examines the Dominionist theology that justifies tactics like the shutdown.

Political historian Rick Perlstein has been doing an eye-opening series “Thinking Like a Conservative”. Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Whenever an exasperated liberal points out that the basic architecture of the Affordable Care Act matches a plan drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s, I feel a stab of exasperation myself—with my side. Theirs is not a clinching argument, or even a good argument. It means nothing to point out to conservatives that Heritage once proposed something like Obamacare. The Heritage plan was a tactic of a moment—a moment that required something to fill in the space to the right of President Clinton’s healthcare plan, an increment toward the real strategic goal of getting the government out of the healthcare business altogether… someday.

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The Ride for the U. S. Constitution was a vision that would put the fear of God into those corrupt left-wing politicians: ten thousand truckers shutting down the Washington beltway for the whole Columbus Day weekend, then delivering their list of demands to a sympathetic congressman, Louis Gohmert of Texas. Or maybe it would be “hundreds of thousands of truckers and millions of citizens“.

They’d convene a citizens’ grand jury (a.k.a. a lynch mob) to indict and arrest “everyone in government who has violated their oath of office” — Obama, certainly, but also Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, among others.

They wouldn’t rely on the lamestream media to spread the word (well, except for Fox News, where Megan Kelly gave them five minutes of air time; independent media magnate Glenn Beck also pushed their cause). They’d do their own viral messaging through Facebook, Twitter, and plain old fliers posted at truck stops. The People would speak so loudly that no one could ignore them!

Of course, in America we have this other way for the People to speak: elections. We just had one last year, and President Obama was re-elected by almost five million votes. It’s not a perfect institution — Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives in spite of getting 1.3  million fewer votes than the Democrats (spreadsheet) — but it’s been working reasonably well ever since it was established in … well, it’s in that Constitution they’re riding for, isn’t it?

But if the People want to speak some other way too, that’s fine with me. (Well, other than that lynch mob thing.) So how many truckers turned out? About 30. I haven’t heard how the arrest of Nancy Pelosi went.

But you can see why We the (dozens of) People would be upset: Government spending is out of control, as this chart clearly shows:

Sorry, wrong chart. Let’s try this one:

Crap! I don’t know what’s wrong with these charts. What if we measure the size of government in employees? Then we’ll really see how out of control the octopus is.

(The peak in 2010 was for temporary census workers.) OK, but the deficit — we know that’s going through the roof. That’s what justifies the Tea Party’s hostage-taking tactics: If we don’t get control of the deficit now, our children will be debt slaves of the Chinese!

Ah, screw the data. We’re just mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more, whatever it is.

As Congress move towards actual budget negotiations, we can expect to hear a lot of hysteria about the national debt. An opening shot was Niall Ferguson’s WSJ op-ed. Economist Brad DeLong explains why Ferguson is peddling complete nonsense.

Voter suppression: The conservative appellate judge who sustained Indiana’s voter-ID law has changed his mind:

the problem is that there hadn’t been that much activity with voter identification. Maybe we should have been more imaginative….We weren’t really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. … I don’t think we had enough information.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court followed him down that path 6-3.

Meanwhile, Kansas and Arizona are planning a new tactic: second-class voters. A Supreme Court ruling against an Arizona law requiring voters to show proof of citizenship apparently applies only to federal elections. So if states split elections into a federal ballot and a state/local ballot, maybe they could give only the federal ballot to voters who haven’t shown proof of citizenship. At least the Supremes haven’t said otherwise yet, so it’s worth a try.

I explained my take on voter suppression two weeks ago: The Republicans have given up on convincing a majority of the American people to agree with them, and are now focused on tactics that allow them to govern from the minority. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the filibuster, the Hastert Rule, blocking a path to citizenship in any immigration reform, the congressional hostage-crisis we’re in the middle of now … it’s all part of the larger plan for minority rule.

The history of the Republican Party in three buttons:

Along the same lines: Listening to NPR’s interview with Bill Minutaglio, author of the new book Dallas, 1963, I was struck by how the extreme Right remains the same from one era to the next. Minutaglio says:

For some reason out in the heartland in the middle of Texas, really powerful people coalesced around this notion that Kennedy was a traitor and in fact was guilty of treason. And these weren’t just folks who were idly thinking these thoughts; they were acting on them and forming organizations and movements to essentially overthrow Kennedy. … He was perceived to be a traitor. He was a socialist, he was on bended knee to so many different entities — communism, socialism and even the pope.

We look back at that now and say, “Those people were crazy.” Today, not even the Tea Party (at least not most of it) claims that JFK was a traitor or a Communist, or that we can’t have a Catholic president because he’ll take orders from the Pope. But they don’t see the connection between that craziness and what they are saying about Obama today.

The L.A. Times has decided it’s only willing to tolerate climate-denier letters up to a point:

I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

Hey, interns: Now you can be sexually harassed while you work for no pay. Is this a great country or what?

A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere,
or a cataclysmic earthquake I’d accept with some despair.
But no — You sent us Congress.
Good God, Sir, was that fair?

— John Adams, 1776

This week everybody was talking about government shutdown

I covered that in a separate article, “Tea Trek: Into Darkness“. The gist is that the current government-shutdown and debt-ceiling confrontation represents something bigger than a fight over ObamaCare. It’s about the Republicans giving up on democracy and seeking to rule from the minority.

and lots and lots of nonsense about ObamaCare

Critics exaggerate the unpopularity of ObamaCare, usually by lumping together the people who want the government to do nothing to help the uninsured (i.e., most Republicans, as Ross Douthat more-or-less acknowledges) with the people who want universal insurance through a single-payer system (i.e., me).

But even to the extent ObamaCare is actually unpopular, you have to take into account that it is the most lied-about program in the history of government. If some guy wants ObamaCare repealed because Rick Santorum convinced him his special-needs child will be euthanized — well, how much weight does that opinion deserve? How much consideration should you give to people who are against ObamaCare but support the Affordable Care Act?

Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald refutes some of the most outrageous anti-ObamaCare claims, but he opens with a level of vitriol that your conservative friends will never wade through. (So send them excerpts rather than a link.) The NYT’s Philip Boffey addresses the ObamaCare-is-killing-jobs argument. Gannett’s Fact-Checker column gave a 0-out-of-10 rating to the truthfulness of the Congress-exempted-itself-from-ObamaCare claim.

As for various implementation glitches as the exchanges roll out on Tuesday: All large government programs have them. The difference with ObamaCare is that Republicans in Congress have refused to cooperate in the post-passage/pre-implementation process of legal fine-tuning that is usually bipartisan and uncontroversial. Any Republicans who genuinely wanted to improve the program rather than sabotage it would find Democrats more than willing to work with them.

Matt Yglesias points out the irony of Senator Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham during his anti-ObamaCare pseudo-filibuster Tuesday: The Dr. Seuss classic is about irrational resistance to something you’ve never tried. If anyone is Sam I Am in this analogy it’s President Obama, who knows the country will like ObamaCare if it ever gets to try it.

Posts by Middle Class Political Economist explain why two pillars of Republican health-care reform won’t work.

We know selling insurance across state lines is a bad idea because we’ve seen this movie before with interstate banking: Rather than increase competition, banks just moved their credit-card operations to the states with the weakest consumer protections, South Dakota and Delaware. The framing of this idea is also weird, particularly for a party that claims to limit federal power: “Allowing” interstate competition is the same as “banning” states from regulating their health-insurance markets, i.e., the federal government will be the only effective health insurance regulator.

We know medical-malpractice reform won’t cut costs, because 39 states have tried this kind of reform with no significant effect. Texas is the prime example.

I’ll add a personal reflection on malpractice reform: The claim is that “defensive medicine” (doctors doing unnecessary tests or treatments to avoid malpractice lawsuits) drives up costs, and so legal reform can lower them. But my wife and I both believe that defensive medicine saved her life. In 1996 she had a mildly suspicious mammogram, and the radiologist recommended rescanning her in six months. But the doctor who had just changed her birth control to something riskier breast-cancer-wise (in other words, the one on the hook for malpractice) insisted on a biopsy. She had stage-2 breast cancer, which could have been stage 3 or 4 six months later.

and promising foreign-policy developments

Just a few weeks ago, I’d have said this was impossible: Friday the UN Security Council voted unanimously — that means Russia and China too — to make Syria give up its chemical weapons. Today, the international team that is supposed to oversee the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons is leaving from The Hague. They should arrive in Damascus tomorrow.

Now, there’s a lot that can still go wrong. But so far nobody seems to be slow-rolling this process, which is what you’d expect if the critics are right and it’s all some elaborate ruse to help Assad keep his weapons rather than get rid of them.

In other news, President Obama and new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani talked on the phone. That may not sound like much, but nothing similar has happened since the days of the Shah. They said nice things to each other. Will that conversation go somewhere? Unclear, but it’s the first optimistic turn in US/Iranian relations in a long, long time.

and the new IPCC report on climate change

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first part of its Fifth Assessment report, updating the Fourth Assessment in 2007. The report itself, even just the 36-page summary for policy-makers, is dense reading for the non-scientist. Grist’s John Upton , ThinkProgress’ Ryan Koronowski and Quartz’ Eric Holthaus summarize.

If you’ve been paying attention to the climate-change issue, there are no big shockers. Between 2007 and 2013, models get better, levels of certainty increase, and the story remains the same: By burning fossil fuels, humans are raising the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, which causes the Earth to reflect less of the Sun’s energy back into space. That’s causing atmospheric temperatures to increase, the ocean to get more acidic, sea levels to rise, glaciers to recede, and so on.

Holthaus calls attention to one process detail worth noting:

What makes the IPCC so important is simple: They are required to agree. Last night, the group pulled an all-nighter to ensure that representatives from all 195 member countries agreed on every single word of the 36-page “summary for policymakers” (pdf).

in a saner world, that process by itself would lay to rest the idea that there is some kind of scientific “controversy” about global warming. There are disagreements about levels of certainty, or how fast things are changing, but the scientists who spend their lives studying this stuff agree on the general outlook.

Predictably but sadly, the release of any major new scientific report about climate change is matched by climate-change deniers turning up the volume on their disinformation campaign. Debunking climate-denier disinformation soaks up a lot of scientific effort that could be better spent elsewhere, but it has to be done: here, here, here, and elsewhere.

In a move you will understand if you read the comments on any major-news-service article on the IPCC report, Popular Science announced Tuesday that its web site will no longer allow readers to comment on news stories. The reason is kind of sad: The trolls won. PopSci realized that its comment threads were promoting more ignorance than knowledge.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

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When I’m not writing about politics, I write about religion. Here’s my latest column for UU World.

The NSA revelations keep dribbling out. Now, the NSA is mapping social connections between Americans. In theory, the NSA is only supposed to spy on foreigners and Americans who have some connection to terrorism investigations. But more and more it looks like that’s just about everybody. It’s a six-degrees-of-Bin-Laden game.

In other NSA news, NSA head General Keith Alexander refused to give a straight answer to Senator Wyden’s question of whether the NSA uses GPS data from American cell phones to track people. The larger theme of Senator Wyden’s tenure on the Senate Intelligence Committee has to do with his frustration about knowing secrets that he can’t tell the public, even though the public ought to know. So probably this interaction is about Wyden trying and failing to get something into the public record that he already knows is true.

New laws in Texas really are keeping people from voting. ThinkProgress tells the story of 84-year-old Dorothy Card, whose legal-aide daughter is making a fourth attempt to get Dorothy a voter-ID card.

Remember how for several years the economy would seem to be coming back in the winter only to sputter in the summer? Turns out that was a glitch. The 2008-2009 crash happened in the winter, so for three years after that the seasonal-adjustment algorithm tried to seasonally adjust to another crash. When the economy didn’t re-crash in the subsequent winters, the seasonal adjustment made it look like it was doing great. The algorithm would then smooth things out by making the summer look bad.

I know, I know: The reporting system can’t be that stupid, can it? Looks like it could. Major policy decisions were based on recoveries and set-backs that never really happened.

The early skirmishes of 2016 are taking place in image-making feature articles.

Liberal Democrats (i.e., people like me) are torn: As in the 2008 cycle, Hillary Clinton is the early favorite. In terms of name recognition and public respect, she looks like the Democrats’ strongest candidate to keep the White House, particularly if she can sail through the primaries without a serious challenge. She’d also rally the women’s vote, which has to be an important part of any Democratic strategy.

OTOH, Clinton would carry forward everything I (and folks like Jonathan Chait) dislike about Obama: the surveillance state, kowtowing to Wall Street, and so on. The presidency of her husband, Bill (The-Era-of-Big-Government-is-Over) Clinton, was a time of peace and relative prosperity, but it left us with a low-expectations liberalism that was content to watch the 1% capture all the economic growth.

That ambivalence is playing out in feature articles. Without discussing 2016 directly or putting forward somebody to run against her, what if we remind everyone of the downside of Clintonism and see if that story takes off? So New Republic has an article about sleazy Clintonista Doug Band, while New York Magazine runs a more positive Hillary profile.

and let’s end with something to make you smile

The New York Times Magazine has a wonderful article about a 103-year-old New Yorker who still enjoys fine restaurants.

“Maybe because I’m eating alone at my age, people at other tables start conversations,” he said. Yes, he tells them, he lives alone, in a modest studio apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and he always eats dinner out, always orders the fish. “They always ask my age, and I often lie and tell them I’m 90,” he said. “If I tell them my real age, it becomes the whole subject of conversation and makes it look like I’m looking for attention, which I’m not.”

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This week’s featured articles: The Summer of Snowden I: language of denial and A brief meditation on white twerking.

This week everybody was talking about eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons without war

Saturday, the Syrian government agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the US and Russia agreed on a plan to eliminate Syria’s chemical stockpile. If the plan works, then the Obama administration will achieve one of its main goals in Syria without using force.

As I wrote last week, though, American motivations in Syria have been muddled. So you should be happy if what you mainly wanted was to uphold international norms against chemical weapons. If, on the other hand, you wanted Assad overthrown, this plan won’t do that. The civil war in Syria, with all its civilian casualties and displaced people, will go on. If you just wanted America to stay out of a situation that doesn’t seem to have any clear solutions, you should be ecstatic.

Meanwhile, the UN inspectors are presenting their findings today. So far they seem in line with what the Obama administration has said: Sarin was used. According to a summary by The Guardian, the Secretary General “did not mention the Assad regime by name but the findings implicated forces linked to Assad.”

On the issue of threatening war and then stopping short of it: WaPo’s Dylan Matthews collects historians’ work on how important it is for a world leader to follow through on his threats. Not very, it turns out.

Paul Huth (now at Maryland) and Bruce Russett (Yale) analyzed 54 historical cases and concluded, “deterrence success is not systematically associated…with the defender’s firmness or lack of it in previous crises.” … The University of Washington’s Jonathan Mercer’s book, Reputation and International Politics, finds that there is no predictable effect of backing down in crisis.

Summarizing and over-simplifying a little: The usual reason leaders don’t follow through is that their threat turns out to be stupid. Your opponents understand this, and if it wouldn’t be stupid to carry out your next threat, they will take it seriously. Dartmouth’s Daryl Press imagines how our failure to attack Syria might be viewed in Iran:

When Iran’s leaders are trying to figure out if we’ll really mess with them if they interfere with tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, they’ll ask, “Does the U.S. really care about global oil flows?” and “Can the US Navy really keep those sea lanes open?”, and the answers are “Yes, we care deeply,” and “Yes, the Navy can,” It would be foolish in the extreme to think that our willingness to intervene in a civil war in which we have no allies and no friends is a good indication to how we’d respond to attacks on genuine national interests.

The weirdest part of this whole story has been the reaction of American conservatives, who somehow see Putin getting an advantage over Obama. Whose ally is giving something up? I guarantee you, if Putin had threatened war unless Israel gave up some kind of weapon, and Obama pressured Israel into promising to do it, conservatives would not be saying Obama had gotten the better of the deal. Steven Benen summarizes in “Revenge is a dish best served coherent“.

and inequality

New numbers from economists Saez and Piketty show what you probably already suspected: The vast majority of the income gains from the post-2008 economic recovery have gone to the wealthy.

The WaPo’s Wonkblog has a great set of graphs explaining “how everyone’s been doing since the financial crisis”. The short version: bankers, corporations, and the rich are doing fine; workers and families not nearly so well.

and whether the government will shut down on October 1 or two weeks later

The fiscal year ends on September 30, and the House Republicans still seem not to have decided on a negotiating position. Most recent estimates say the government will hit the debt ceiling by mid-October. President Obama is refusing to negotiate over that issue. (I agree with that position, BTW. You negotiate over issues where you want to do one thing and your opponents want to do another. But the debt ceiling is more like a hostage crisis. Nobody wants the US to default on its debts or promises; Republicans are just counting on Democrats not wanting it more than they do.)

but I wrote about the NSA

This week begins a series I call The Summer of Snowden. Part I of the series examines what the NSA’s words really mean.

Just an aside: Foreign Policy reports that the NSA’s “Information Dominance Center” was

designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a “whoosh” sound when they slid open and closed.

Well, at least it’s not the Death Star.

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America makes the best TV shows because our dysfunctional systems produce more drama. (Could The Wire have been set in a clean, prosperous, well-managed city? Hats off to Baltimore!) Cartoonist Christopher Keelty observes:

One thing that really interests me about [Breaking Bad] is how it juxtaposes two of America’s most catastrophic policy failures: The for-profit health care industry and the failed War on Drugs

The next Fed chair won’t be Larry Summers. As Treasury Secretary under Clinton, he championed the financial deregulation that prepared the ground for the Crash of 2008. And as President Obama’s first Director of the National Economic Council he was one of the architects of the save-Wall-Street-first strategy. So I’m not sorry to see him shuffle off the stage.

I’ve had a policy of avoiding outrage-of-the-day articles, so I’ve barely mentioned Pat Robertson or Glenn Beck at all lately. AlterNet’s Amanda Marcotte makes the case for covering them more closely, because otherwise they get to maintain one image for the general public and another for their followers.

There’s a widespread and concentrated effort on the right to keep the crazy talk as far out of sight of the opposition as possible, while simultaneously disseminating their ideas among the true believers. This reality doesn’t comport with the claim that they benefit from mainstream media attention, but the opposite.