The Weekly Sift

The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on.

—   Robert Kennedy (1968), two months before his assassination,

Among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.

— Abraham Lincoln (1863), quoted by Kennedy in the same speech

This week, we had another shooting

I hope the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin doesn’t turn out to be the hate crime it looks like. And even more, I hope it isn’t a hate crime by somebody who thought that Sikhs are Muslims because they wear turbans. It’s bad enough to die for your religion, but it would be even worse to die because somebody mistook you for some other religion.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist, so of course this incident reminds me of the Knoxville shooting at a UU church.

Until then, everybody was talking about the Olympics

Watching this Olympics is frustrating for sports fans, because we’re not NBC’s target audience. They’re covering the Olympics as a phenomenon that just happens to include athletes, and the target audience watches because that’s what you do in August of a leap year.

So an hour of coverage contains maybe 10-15 minutes of actual competition. The rest consists of athletes’ backstories, retrospectives of past Olympics, interviews with people who aren’t competing, features on English culture, post-event bouncing and hugging, medal award ceremonies, and so on.

Yes, NBC, Gabby Douglas does have a great smile. I noticed that the other 12 times you mentioned it. But there’s a Russian girl who’s actually doing something right now. Could we maybe get a look at her?

When NBC does get around to the competitions, sportscasting is an afterthought. Announcers tell the story before the fact, and if the event turns out some other way it’s as if reality screwed up by failing to fulfill their predictions. (Sunday night, the other vaulters were covered as if they were just the opening act for McKayla Maroney. What in reality was an exciting upset by the Romanian was presented as a mystifying glitch.) A long race is just a visual backdrop for a chat about the American runner. (Uh, guys, some African is coming up strong on the outside. Can you tell us who he is? Are you watching?)  And I frequently find myself yelling at the TV: “Fascinating anecdote, but what’s the score? TELL ME THE SCORE!”

Oh well, why should they care what I think when the ratings are this good?

… and about Mitt Romney’s taxes

because he still refuses to release tax returns before 2010. This week’s episode centered on Harry Reid quoting an anonymous source who told him Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.” Romney countered that he “paid a lot of taxes” every year, and challenged Reid to “put up or shut up” by naming his source. But Romney will not put up anything to support his own claims.

This exchange continues the long tradition of August as silly season. Romney and Reid are arguing about what they could prove if they wanted to, but neither is actually proving anything.

Why are we talking about this? The tax-return issue only matters if it crystalizes a pattern. Two possibilities: First, a character pattern in which Romney is not just rich, but arrogant. He has decided what voters need to know about him, and that’s that.

Second, a pattern of vagueness and shiftiness. This non-disclosure reminds voters that Romney also hasn’t released the details of his tax plan, or his budget plan, or his health care plan, or anything else. Plus he still has at least two positions on culture-war issues like abortion and contraception.

Ezra Klein makes the second link:

If [Romney’s people] thought releasing more details would make the [tax] plan look better rather than worse, they would have released them rather than letting outside organizations fill in the blanks. It’s essentially the same theory as refusing to release the tax returns.

… and jobs.

The July jobs report was a dog that didn’t bark. After a dismal June (only 64,000 new jobs), July could have signaled the onset of a new recession. But instead the economy added 163,000 jobs. That’s not enough to keep the unemployment rate from ticking up to 8.3%, but this bumpy not-quite-recovery muddles along.

Naturally, the commentary focused on how the report affects the stock market (up), and Obama’s re-election chances (also up). But shouldn’t it be about the people who either got or didn’t get jobs?

Meanwhile, I wrote about insecure software

• The Looming Software Catastrophe. I can’t predict what it will be or when, but two events this week made it obvious there will be one.

And you might also find this stuff interesting

Courtesy of George Takei (whose service on the Enterprise must give him an in with the space program), we get the first photos from the Curiosity probe that has landed on Mars:

I spent the week in Illinois, close enough to Missouri to hear the political ads in the last week before the primary. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman has gone all-in with Sarah Palin. You’d think Palin was the candidate. She has become the face and voice of the Steelman campaign.

The NYT’s “Your Money” column addressed an interesting question: Suppose you’ve come to the conclusion that the for-profit financial services industry is rigged against you, but you haven’t taken a vow of poverty and you still want to save and invest for your retirement. What do you do?

Your first move is obvious: bank at a credit union. For IRA and/or brokerage services, use

Vanguard, USAA or TIAA-CREF, all of which are member-owned or use profits to pay dividends to customers and lower their fees.

The column offers a number of investment ideas, from municipal bonds to direct investments in real estate properties or person-to-person loans to the “slow money” movement that loans money to co-ops, organic farms, and other socially conscious ventures.

Here’s a nice clear answer to the question: Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought? Basically, climate change makes droughts more frequent and more extreme, even though you can’t say a particular drought couldn’t have happened otherwise.

I was going to use the metaphor of a weighted coin or a loaded die, but I discovered James Hansen did it long ago:

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability. … But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

No single roll proves the dice are loaded, but eventually …

it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

Disillusioned GOP congressional staffer Mike Lofgren has a new book out: The Party is Over. An excerpt, “Religion Destroyed My Party“, is up at Salon.

Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war. … The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs.

So long, Gore Vidal. My favorite Vidal novels are the ancient-history ones: Creation and Julian.

It’s easy to forget (and people under 50 probably never knew) just how famous Vidal was in his prime. Lily Tomlin could count on everyone recognizing his mispronounced name when she made him one of the first victims of her Ernestine the Operator character on Laugh In.

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was a huge success. You’ve got to wonder if this means the Fox News model will spread to fast food and you’ll only be able to eat with people who share your politics. What if the CEO of Carl’s Jr. is thinking: “Wait a minute. I’m just as bigoted and reactionary as Dan Cathy. Why can’t I get an appreciation day?”

From a marketing POV, it makes sense: Fast-food chains don’t need a majority. If you could just get the most extreme 10% of the country to identify with you, you’d make billions.

I was looking for a striking image to end with. Is this one good enough? It’s a nighttime electrical storm over an erupting volcano in Iceland.

I  was shown how fragile life was on Saturday. I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end.  

— Jessica Redfield, who avoided a mall shooting in June
only to die Friday morning in the Dark Knight massacre

This week everybody was talking about the Dark Knight shooting

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about it, so I won’t rehash it all.

if you know a jumble of contradictory “facts” about the shooting in Aurora, straighten your picture out by reading its Wikipedia article. That’s totally not how we were taught to use encyclopedias, but it makes sense. The news media tends to

• sensationalize
• try so hard to be first that they don’t get the details right
• speculate
• over-emphasize the newest detail
• under-emphasize corrections of what they got wrong

But a constantly updated encyclopedia article tells the story as we currently understand it.

A shocking event naturally generates a whole series of secondary stories as people react. Two common reactions are worth paying attention to:

Gun control. The shooter’s equipment included an assault rifle, which is not hunting gear or home-defense weaponry. So one natural question is “Why do we let people buy this stuff?”

Bill Moyers presents the simple answer: The NRA is one of the world’s most effective lobbying organizations. In its absolutist view, reserving military weaponry for the military is just the first step down a slippery slope towards completely disarming the public in preparation for tyranny.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to have a serious gun control discussion in this election cycle. President Obama doesn’t want to talk about it at all, for fear of losing gun-owner votes in swing states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, and Mitt Romney doesn’t want to either embrace or defy the extreme pro-gun position.

Arizona politician Russell Pearce, for example, wishes that there had been more guns in the theater. Had the audience “been able to fire on their attacker, lives could have been saved”. The Washington Times agrees.

This point comes up every time there’s a major shooting, and pro-gun extremists will keep making it until the scene plays out in reality and we see what a nightmare it is. Imagine: One movie-goer notices the first shots, pulls out his gun and shoots back, hitting either a bystander or the shooter’s armor. More people see his muzzle-flash in the dark, think he’s the shooter, and start shooting at him. Result: chain reaction until everybody is shooting at everybody.

Religious right response. To folks like Congressman Louis Gohmert, the shooting was caused by separation of church and state. If we were the kind of Christian nation we used to be, God would protect us from stuff like this. Gohmert specifically faulted taking prayers out of high school graduations.

This is Jerry Falwell blaming 9-11 on the ACLU all over again. I feel stupid for not seeing it coming.

And finally, race makes a difference:

… which made the political back-and-forth seem trivial

This week the pressure built on Romney to release more of his tax returns, which he still refuses to do. The buzz has gone from “Why doesn’t he just get this over with?” to “What is he hiding?” Even Republicans are asking.

Meanwhile, President Obama made this common-sense statement:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

which became a “gaffe” when Republicans cut it down to “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” — as if that referred to business rather than roads, bridges, and this unbelievable American system.

I’m going to give Ann Romney a pass on her “you people” remark. She didn’t fully enunciate “you”, so some are claiming she didn’t really say it. It’s too stupid a point to argue about.

Going overboard sometimes backfires, so here’s my rhetorical advice for Democrats: Laugh at Ann, but don’t vilify her. Keep asking what Mitt is hiding, but don’t speculate too much. If you don’t know, you don’t know.

But I wrote about Peak Oil and contraception

• Peak Oil? Maybe not. The difficult thing about living in the reality-based community is that you have to change your opinion when the world changes. Now it looks like peak oil isn’t happening — world oil extraction has headed back up. What’s that mean for the economy and the environment?
• Reading Humanae Vitae. It’s Natural Family Planning Awareness Week in the Catholic Church, when the bishops warn their flock about the dangers of birth control that actually works. I think it’s a good time to go back and read Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical that the Church’s birth-control policy hangs on.

and you might also find this interesting

Grist’s David Roberts highlights the latest Romney betrayal-of-everything-he-once-stood-for: He now opposes an EPA rule limiting the amount of mercury power plants can release into the air. A Romney spokeswoman said:

President Obama cannot claim to support clean coal while imposing regulations that his EPA admits would prevent another coal plant from ever being built.

To which Roberts replied:

To paraphrase: “Obama cannot claim to support clean coal while passing rules saying coal has to be clean.” Uh … sure he can. In fact that seems exactly like what someone who supports clean coal would do: prohibit dirty coal!

After two years of study, the Boy Scouts announced will continue to ban gays from scouting. You can tell they’re ashamed of themselves, because their announcement explains nothing, does not say who studied the issue, and does not mention gays at all.  It just announces “no change” in its “longstanding membership standards”.

To Rabbi Clifford Kulwin, this decision betrays the Scout Law he learned as a boy.

If only Scout leaders had acted with bravery and courage, and told the world that our principles are universal and sacred — and open to every single boy who wants to try to live up to them. Instead, they caved to bigotry and zealotry.

I still owe you a LIBOR-scandal-for-Dummies article, but this post from the NYT DealBook blog explains a lot about how a few bankers could manipulate key interest-rate benchmarks.

Mortgage rates are based on the 1-year LIBOR — supposedly the rate at which banks make 1-year loans to each other. The problem? These days, banks hardly ever loan each other money for more than a month. So the 1-year LIBOR is “largely guesswork”. And because the mortgage market is so huge, even tiny manipulations produce big profits.

Sara Robinson raises an important point: If a committee of bureaucrats decides what you can buy, how much does it matter whether they meet in a government office or a corporate office?

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Recent Sift articles did well on Daily Kos. A week ago yesterday, The Economics of Leviticus made the recommended list, and What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism did the same the next day.

Meet the kids the DREAM Act is about.

And finally, an idea just wacky enough to work: What if local government uses its eminent domain power to buy up underwater mortgages at fair market value, i.e., much less than the home-owners owe? Then the mortgages can be refinanced at the actual value of the houses.

The beauty of the idea is that it doesn’t require any action from gridlocked Washington. Local government just starts using an existing power in a new way.

While our legislative branch, the foundational pillar of our republic, is the least trusted institution in the country, our standing army and police forces are the most. Increasingly, we trust the men with the guns, not the men in suits. The sound you hear is the founders rolling over in their graves.

Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites (2012)

This week everybody was talking about … the heat

Records were set all over the country. But unlike the DC snowstorm of 2010, it had nothing to do with global warming.

… and the Higgs boson

I love discussions where nobody knows what they’re talking about, including me. I caught up a little by consulting the Instant Egghead at Scientific American.

You can also get some  general background on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider from this 2008 rap by Alpinekat (a.k.a. Katherine McAlpine).

… and the political fallout from the ObamaCare decision

Some argued that the ruling was good for Romney, because it energizes the conservative base. But I agree more with Alec MacGillis:

Judging this the better outcome for Romney means seriously understating just how brutal the law’s rejection would have been for Obama. It would have allowed Romney to argue—to crow to the skies, surely—that Obama’s entire first term had been a giant zero.

From Day 1, the right-wing drumbeat against Obama has been that his presidency is illegitimate: He’s not really American, he doesn’t understand America, he doesn’t follow the Constitution, and so on. John Roberts saying ObamaCare is constitutional makes that look like the crank theory it has always been.

Of course, you fix a crank theory with another crank theory, so Roberts’ betrayal sparked wild conspiracy theories on the Right.

My theory: Roberts doesn’t want to go down in history as the Chief Justice who broke the Supreme Court. As much as people have always complained about the Court, it used to be seen as above partisan politics. But controversial decisions like Bush/Gore and Citizens United have put that image in serious jeopardy. If a party-line vote threw out the biggest Democratic legislative accomplishment of the last half century, with a majority opinion based on a new legal distinction invented precisely for that purpose, the Court might not recover.

The Court doesn’t control any money or soldiers, so it needs its reputation. If they’re just nine over-the-hill political hacks who can’t be fired, then why shouldn’t presidents defy them? Why wouldn’t some future President Nixon just burn the tapes?

[I covered the ruling itself last week. Harvard’s Einer Elhauge has an enlightening refutation of Roberts’ reading of the Commerce Clause.]

Meanwhile, the Partisans made fun of people who now want to leave the country to avoid socialized medicine.

… but I decided to write about institutional failure and Leviticus

• In Search of a Universal F***-Up Theory. It’s not hard to come up with specific theories explaining why our political institutions are dysfunctional, our religious institutions corrupt, our economic institutions rapacious, our media institutions untrustworthy, and so on. But why is all this failure happening at once? (And no, I don’t think it’s the Internet, the Koch Brothers, or the end times.)
• The Economics of Leviticus. You can’t have a culture-war conversation without somebody quoting Leviticus. What if you couldn’t have an economic conversation without somebody quoting Leviticus? That would change a lot of things, right down to our basic understanding of property.

Meanwhile, you might also find this interesting

Verizon has opened the next front in the corporate-personhood battle: It says that the FCC’s net neutrality rules are unconstitutional because

Broadband networks are the modern-day microphone by which their owners [e.g. Verizon] engage in First Amendment speech

Weird. I thought I was engaging in First Amendment speech, and that Verizon’s broadband network was just carrying that speech to some of my readers. But no, Verizon is speaking. Can you hear them now?

The Obama campaign is making hay out of Romney’s offshore accounts and his refusal to release tax returns before 2010.

Here’s why Romney might carry Pennsylvania: Under the new voter-ID law passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor, 9.2% of registered voters don’t have the appropriate IDs yet, including 18% of voters in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. That’s more voters than Obama’s margin in 2008.

One of the mysteries of polling this year is why Romney is sometimes ahead in the Gallup tracking poll, while Obama is consistently ahead in polls of swing states and close in states Romney has to carry, like North Carolina. It seems unimaginable that Romney could win the national popular vote and not carry North Carolina handily.

Possible answer: Gallup’s methodology systematically undercounts non-whites.

Meanwhile, polling wonks will love Nate Silver’s attempt to model the influence of the economy on presidential elections.

A good, practical talk about teaching:

The Myth of the Super Teacher from EdWriters on Vimeo.

I was going to write my own decline-of-Justice-Scalia article, but Salon’s Paul Campos did it for me. Back in the day, Scalia was the kind of conservative a liberal could admire. He viewed the world through a different lens, but he challenged us to raise our game. I always learned something from reading a Scalia opinion. Now, though, he just repeats what he’s heard on Fox News. It’s embarrassing.

Anybody who goes to a big 4th of July celebration must wonder: What if all the fireworks went off at once? Well, in San Diego they found out.

I spent Wednesday evening in Lowell, where the fireworks were backlit by lightning over Boston. But if I had been in Alabama Friday I could have attended a different night-time ritual: the “sacred Christian cross lighting ceremony” that culminated a conference sponsored by the white supremacist Christian Identity Ministries. Apparently this was not a hoax.

After waffling for a few days, Mitt Romney now has his position on whether an individual healthcare mandate is a tax: It’s a tax when Obama does it nationally, but it wasn’t a tax when he did it in Massachusetts. In his own words:

The Supreme Court is the highest court in the nation, and it said that it’s a tax, so it’s a tax. … The chief justice in his opinion made it very clear that at the state level, states have the power to put in place mandates. And as a result, Massachusetts’s mandate was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the legislature and by me, and so it stays as it was.

Salon checks in on the Elizabeth Warren campaign. To me that race comes down to: Do you want your senator to be owned by the bankers, or not?

Here’s the difference between public and private: Public employees have a mission that goes beyond profit. Case in point: A private Florida lifeguard company fired a lifeguard for saving a life outside company territory.

Republicans want to replace ObamaCare with “patient-centered health care”. What is patient-centered health care? A phrase that tests well in focus groups. It does not refer to any specific proposal.

A legislator who voted for Louisiana’s radical new school-voucher program is now opposed to it. What changed? She suddenly realized that a “religious school” doesn’t have to be Christian. She supports freedom of religion, just not for Muslims.

Factoid discovered while researching something else entirely: The word boycott comes from Captain Charles Boycott, who was the agent of an absentee landlord in Ireland in 1880. To protest Boycott’s eviction of tenant farmers, the local community ostracized him, and workers refused to harvest the land he managed.

Come November, women shouldn’t forget what conservatives stand for.

But let’s end on a moment of cute. Pandas on a slide are like 4-year-olds who are too round and fluffy to get hurt.