The Weekly Sift

If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

— GIIP Report: “Upper Big Branch“

In this week’s Sift:

• Jobs of the Future. Two consecutive jobless recoveries raise a question: Does the economy work differently now? And is concentration of wealth the culprit or technology?
• Why I Hate Vouchers. Private-sector competitors to public programs achieve their “efficiency” by skimming off the easy-to-serve. That begins a vicious cycle of erosion, which continues until the public program serves only a small group of very needy, very powerless people — who can then be ignored. If we had the stomach for it, we could achieve the same savings by ignoring the needy without going through the voucher charade.
• Short Notes. An independent report lays it on the line: Massey Energy’s calculated neglect killed 29 miners. What can we learn from the Rapture? Obama offers substance — and is mostly ignored. Now that we have a Democratic president and a Republican Senate minority, judicial filibusters are back. The Catholic Church’s Woodstock defense. I refuse to care about Arnold. The Onion outs the Facebook-CIA connection. It’s OK to be Takei. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If not “plastics”, then what should we tell this year’s graduates?

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We’ve now had two jobless recoveries in a row. The 2001 recession technically ended in November, 2001 (see Wikipedia’s list of recessions), but the total number of American jobs didn’t return to its pre-recession level until October, 2003. And while the 2007-2009 recession ended in June, 2009, we’re still nearly 7 million jobs short of the March, 2007 peak.

So recessions end, but jobs return slowly. Worse, the new jobs aren’t as good as the old ones. Laid-off welders don’t get rehired at Chrysler, they become shelf-stockers at WalMart.

As different as they seem otherwise, both Bush and Obama followed the widely accepted get-the-jobs-back formula: run deficits and cut interest rates. Interest rates plunged near zero. Bush got his deficit mostly by cutting taxes; Obama mostly by increasing spending. Both fought wars. But neither got a clean bounce in jobs.

What’s up with that?

Some economists blame the workers: They don’t have the right training for the new jobs. (Structural unemployment, it’s called.) But if that were the whole explanation, some industry would be begging for workers, and some credential would be a magic ticket. What is it? If you were remaking The Graduate today, what word could plausibly replace “plastics“?

What if it’s not the workers? What if the economy has changed in some sinister way?

Wealth and demand. Regular Sift readers have been down this road before. In November, I explained the argument Robert Reich makes in Aftershock: Concentration of wealth is the underlying problem. A mass-production economy requires a massive number of people with disposable income. If wealth gets too concentrated, demand lags, and then no one wants to invest in new production — because who’s going to buy the new products? So instead of productive investment, capital gets sucked into speculative bubbles like the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000 or the housing bubble that popped in 2007-2008.

Reich’s theory solves the jobless-recovery mystery like this: Ordinary recessions start because investment and production get ahead of demand — builders overbuild, factories over-produce, stores over-order. Then everybody puts the brakes on at once, and times are tough. But after six months or so, the over-stocked inventories run out, new merchandise gets ordered, factories start up again, and workers get re-hired.

By contrast, the expansion phase of a bubble isn’t just over-optimistic, it’s delusional. (The high-flying start-ups of the dot-com bubble had no business models. No amount of economic growth would have made them profitable.) When the bubble pops, the fantasy is exposed and there’s no going back. So it takes longer for the unemployed to find jobs again, because so many of them will have to do something genuinely new.

Reich’s diagnosis and prescription focus on politics: Since Ronald Reagan, tax cuts and de-regulation have tilted the playing field to over-favor the rich, leading to an over-concentration of wealth and a bubble economy. Undo that, and you return to the broadly shared prosperity of 1950-1980.

But what if it’s not that simple? What if something other than politics has its thumb on the scale?

Technology and the neo-Luddites. Martin Ford’s recent book The Lights in the Tunnel argues that concentration of wealth is itself an effect of something else: technology.

His argument is a refinement of the one Luddites made 200 years ago and that was made most entertainingly in the 1951 Alec Guinness film The Man in the White Suit: Eventually, automation and technology will eliminate the need for workers.

200 years ago, it didn’t work out that way. Instead, demand expanded to match the increased productivity, which is how the average American or European now lives at a level of luxury that was unimaginable then.

Why won’t that keep happening? Most economists are confident it will, but Ford makes two counter-arguments: First, we are approaching a game-changing point where machines become autonomous. The wages of machine-operators won’t keep pace because there won’t be any machine-operators. Second, the acceleration of technology may reach a point where economic forces can’t keep up. In theory new markets would continue to be created, but those too would automate faster than human workers could be trained to fill the new jobs.

Low-demand dystopia. In either case, an unregulated market leads to a low-demand dystopia, where production depends entirely on capital, labor is irrelevant, and so only people with capital are economically viable. In short, income depends entirely on owning things, not doing things. So production shrinks to accommodate the needs of owners, and the unemployed masses subsist on welfare and charity.

If this seems incredible, Ford gives one very good historic example: the slave-holding South. Economically, slaves are capital, not labor. (The are bought and maintained like robots, not hired and incentivized like workers.) So the South was a society in which virtually all production came from capital. The result was a stagnant economy that worked well for the small owning class, but in which an ambitious young person without money had few opportunities. And the South only worked as well as it did because of exports — external demand. An entire world based on such a model would be a low-demand dystopia.

Marx addressed a similar dystopian vision by having the government own the means of production. In practice, that didn’t work out so well — whether government takes over business (communism) or business takes over government (fascism), the combination becomes totalitarian because it’s too powerful to control.

Instead, Ford proposes a complex system in which taxes shift away from wages to focus on capital and production, funding a complicated set of incentives for citizens to live in society-enhancing ways — thus keeping income widely distributed and maintaining the mass market. I’m not sure this is any more workable than communism, but it does have the virtue that it can be implemented within our current economy, with the incentives supplementing wages rather than immediately replacing them.

Future jobs vs. futuristic jobs. Personally, I believe that Ford’s vision is worth keeping in mind as a thought experiment that shows what’s wrong with conservative economic policies. But I believe his dystopia is further off than he thinks, because economic forces have quite a bit of resiliency left if we stop sabotaging them by favoring capital over labor.

A short post by Matt Yglesias makes an excellent point: Most “jobs of the future” will not be futuristic. It has never been the case that new industries created the mass of new jobs needed. We’re fooled by looking at the huge factories of the 19th and 20th centuries. They employed a lot of people individually, but collectively they didn’t come close to absorbing the jobs lost when agriculture automated. (You can see the same phenomenon in China today. Even with a massive export market, Chinese factories are barely keeping up with the flow of peasants into the cities.)

Technology creates jobs through economic growth, not through new industries. For example, one of the growth professions of the 19th century was teaching. Teachers had been around forever, but until the 19th century only rich children had them. The growth industries of the late 20th century weren’t rocketry or nuclear power, but health care and food preparation — because prosperity let people live longer and eat out more.

Rich families today employ lots of trainers, coaches, therapists, decorators, and advice-givers of all sorts. If many more people suddenly became “rich” by today’s standards, the economy would need a lot more such advisors — and not a lot more nano-technologists.

I know it seems crazy to imagine an economy full of people advising each other — who will make stuff? But it was just as crazy in 1800 to imagine an economy where hardly anybody farmed.

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In an LA Times story running down the Milwaukee teachers’ union, we get one small fact that sums up why I hate voucher programs.

Low-income parents can use vouchers to send their children to private and parochial schools, a decades-long experiment that [Governor Scott] Walker proposes expanding. That has left the [Milwaukee public school] district with a disproportionate share of students with learning disabilities — 19%. In voucher schools, which can return students to the Milwaukee district if they don’t behave, the figure is 1% to 8.6%.

I’ll bet it now costs the Milwaukee public schools more to educate their “average” student than the private schools spend. And no doubt voucher supporters are wielding such statistics to prove that private schools are more “efficient”. But the underlying phenomenon isn’t government inefficiency. It’s that vouchers encourage the easy-to-teach students to leave while the hard-to-teach students stay.

That’s how vouchers work — not just in education, but in general. Government programs are based on the idea that we are a community, so we’re all in this together. Voucher programs are based on the idea that we are all individuals, so if you can get a better individual deal, you should go for it.

The result is always the same: Fortunate people who are easy to serve can take their vouchers into the private sector and get a better deal. The pool that is left behind in the public program is harder to serve, so average costs go up, making the private-sector voucher a good deal for even more people, in a vicious cycle.

The Walker education-voucher program is eroding Milwaukee’s public schools this way. The Ryan healthcare-voucher program will do the same to Medicare and Medicaid.

In the long run, there is only one way that vouchers will save taxpayers money: Eventually the public-program pool gets so small and so needy that it has no political power. Then we can lock them away in some cheap hellhole institution that doesn’t serve their needs at all, and what are they going to do about it? Cha-ching!

Of course, we could get the same savings without involving the private sector: Just let public programs throw hard-to-serve people out on the street to fend for themselves. But that would be horrible and heartless, wouldn’t it? The rest of us will sleep better if we achieve the same result by sleight-of-hand.

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The same shell game is happening in states that privatize their prisons. Do private prisons save money? No. Even though (like private schools and private health insurance programs) they “steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates”, they cost more.

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Back in the 90s, Newt Gingrich owned up to the erosion strategy, saying that he favored letting Medicare “wither on the vine” rather than attacking the popular program directly. Afterwards, pundits agreed that it was scare-mongering to quote Newt accurately on this subject.

Now he wants to declare another mulligan: He retracted his criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare-slashing voucher proposal after a firestorm of protest from the Right. So he says that it’s unfair if Democrats use the tape: “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood, because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate.”

Democrats, as we all know, get to retract any gaffe they make, and no one ever mentions it again. Just ask Howard Dean and John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

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The Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel has issued its report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster that killed 29 miners a little over a year ago. Let’s skip to the conclusions on page 108:

Ultimately, the responsibility for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine lies with the management of Massey Energy.  … The April 5, 2010 explosion was … a completely predictable result for a company that ignored basic safety standards.

Massey didn’t ventilate the mine properly, let coal dust build up, and eventually the inevitable spark came that it all set off. Massey was warned, battled federal safety regulators tooth and nail, paid some wrist-slap fines, and did things its own way until 29 miners died. How could that happen? Easy.

Many politicians were afraid to challenge Massey’s supremacy because of the company’s superb ongoing public relations campaign and because CEO Don Blankenship was willing to spend vast amounts of money to influence elections. … If their elected officials depend on the corporation for campaign funds, there is no one to whom the miners can turn to make sure their workplace is safe.

And that’s a lesson for all of us. Corporations are sociopaths. If they can make money by killing people, they will. And if elections depend on corporate money, governments will let them.

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The failed Rapture prediction triggered two Interesting articles: When Prophecy Fails in Slate and Rapture-Ready: the Science of Self-Delusion in Mother Jones.

Summary: Rationalization has great power to resolve contradictions of all sorts, and religious people aren’t the only ones who use it.

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While the media has been focused on the antics of Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, President Obama has given substantive and informative speeches on immigration reform and the Middle East and education.

Out of this, only one line drew national attention: “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” The furor over this — MIke Huckabee said “The President of United States betrayed Israel” and many other Republicans expressed similar feelings — is a little mysterious. When has a U.S. president said anything significantly different?

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In the spirit of Emma Goldman (“If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution”), here are the biting-but-entertaining political videos of the week: John LIthgow performs a Newt Gingrich press release, a hippyish chorus on a hillside reminds us that the issue with the Koch brothers is “the evil thing“, and George (Sulu) Takei offering his name to counter Tennessee’s new don’t-say-gay law. Also, WhoWhatWhy recalls the classic George Carlin “I’m a Modern Man” routine.

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The Onion News Network reveals that Facebook is actually a very efficient CIA program.

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BTW, the don’t-say-gay bill got watered down before it passed. Now it’s only prepared materials that can’t mention homosexuality; teachers can still answer questions about it. [Full — and proud — disclosure: My nephew Mike Stephens interned for State Senator Andy Berke, who is quoted criticizing the bill.]

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Media Matters totals up the partisan split of Meet the Press guests, going back to the Clinton years. Conclusion: When Democrats control the White House, MTP splits its guests almost evenly between the two parties. Under Republican administrations, Republicans get a 60/40 advantage.

Ask yourself: Which failed presidential candidate have you seen more often on national networks: John Kerry or John McCain?

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I just shook my head sadly during the John Edwards debacle, so I’m going to similarly restrain my reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger. We’ll have plenty of time to discuss their sex scandals if either of them runs for office again. And if they don’t, I don’t care.

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On his NYT blog, college professor Stanley Fish comments on the deals Florida State has made with the Koch brothers and BB&T, which I wrote about last week.

Is the [Koch] foundation funding the study of free-market economics — a perfectly respectable academic subject — or is it mandating that free-market economics be promoted in the classroom? Is it a gift intended to stimulate research the conclusions of which can not be known in advance, or is it a gift intended to amplify a conclusion — free-market economics is good; regulation is bad — the philanthropists have already reached and want to broadcast using Florida State University as a megaphone?

… If, in the judgment of an instructor, “Atlas Shrugged” will contribute to a student’s understanding of a course’s subject, there is every reason to assign it. But if assigning “Atlas Shrugged” is the price for the receiving of monies and the university pays that price, it has indeed sold its soul.

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It was fun to watch Jon Stewart debate Bill O’Reilly about the Fox-promoted, scary-black-guy controversy over the rapper Common (seen here with his monstrous friend Elmo). But I wonder if Stewart lost just by showing up, because his appearance helped Fox keep the story hot.

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Remember 2005, when the Democratic minority had just enough Senate votes to filibuster judges nominated by a Republican president? The Republicans threatened the “nuclear option” — eliminating the filibuster — until a bipartisan “Gang of 14” rode to the rescue with a compromise under which only “extraordinary circumstances” would justify a judicial-nomination filibuster.

As a result, centrist Democrats did not support a filibuster of the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, who turned out to be the deciding vote in Citizens United. (Justice O’Connor, the Reagan-appointed judge Alito replaced, has said that she still supports the decision that CU overturned.)

Well, now the Republicans have a Senate minority and a Democratic president is nominating judges, so of course that agreement is toast. Dahlia Lithwick assembles all the that-was-then-this-is-now hypocrisy.

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A church-funded study of sexual abuse by Catholic priests attributes the scandal to the social turmoil of the 60s and 70s. The NYT refers to this as the “blame Woodstock” theory.

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I agree with Matt Yglesias: It’s fine if you want to make the case that a government program isn’t working or costs too much. But once you have an arbitrary spending cap, what ends up mattering is the political clout of the beneficiaries, not the effectiveness of the programs.

This is why I get a chill in my bones any time I hear discussion of “caps” on federal spending. … Capping things is code for “let’s keep all the spending that lobbyists love and make up the difference by slashing the incomes of poor people.”

Evidence: Even at a time when the deficit is supposedly Public Enemy #1 and Exxon’s profits are at an all-time high, the Senate can’t muster the votes to eliminate tax subsidies for the oil companies. Let’s take the money out of Medicaid instead, or cut more Pell grants.

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Lawrence O’Donnell relates the history of “starve the beast”.

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Several high school and college students are regular Sift readers. What advice would you give them about preparing for the future economy?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

No amount of balloting can obviate the need of creating an issue, be it a measure or a candidate, on which the voters can say Yes, or No. … The Many can elect after the Few have nominated.

— Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1920)

In this week’s Sift:

• Hit the Ceiling or Raise the Roof? It’s hard to predict exactly what will happen if Congress doesn’t raise the government’s debt ceiling, because then the administration will have a lot of choices to make. Unfortunately, all the options will be bad.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser. Democracy requires a lot of work. And when honest people won’t do it, it still has to get done.
• Short Notes. Answering birthers. ElBaradei imagines a Bush war-crimes trial. Senate recalls in Wisconsin. Peer-to-peer lending. Anxious teen girls. Roe v Wade in limbo. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If we don’t want to put the essential work of democracy in the hands of special interests, how do we want to get it done?

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It’s been hard to get a clear story about what will happen if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Michelle Bachman says things will be just hunky-dory:

If we fail to pass increasing the debt ceiling, it isn’t that the federal government shuts down … It isn’t that revenues wouldn’t come into the government, they would. It’s just that we’d have to prioritize our spending. … It almost acts like a balanced budget amendment in a way because it says you can’t keep spending money you don’t have. That’s a good thing!

But back in January, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made the possibility sound apocalyptic:

The Treasury would be forced to default on legal obligations of the United States, causing catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

And Fed chief Ben Bernanke recently warned:

Beyond a certain point … the United States would be forced into a position of defaulting on its debt. And the implications of that on our financial system, our fiscal policy and our economy would be catastrophic.

Let’s see if I can unravel this. Much as I usually hate the analogy between the federal budget and a family budget (for reasons Matt Yglesias explains), in this case it lends some insight. Suppose your family is spending more than it takes in, running up a little more debt every month. Then your credit maxes out. What happens?

Well, you very suddenly start living within your income — prioritizing your spending, as Bachmann says. But it’s hard to make more specific predictions until we know what those priorities will be. Maybe you’ll default on your mortgage, as Bernanke imagines, or maybe you’ll cut back somewhere else so that you don’t.

Whether “that’s a good thing” or not depends on what somewhere-elses are available. Maybe you’re outspending your income because you’re an alcoholic, and you’ll have to clean up your act now that the liquor store won’t take your plastic. Or maybe you’re running in the red because your daughter needs surgery and you have no medical insurance.

It makes a difference, doesn’t it?

Bachmann wants us to believe that the federal budget is full of money spent at the corner tavern, buying rounds for the house. If that were true, she’d be right. Shutting off the government’s credit would be good.

But she knows it’s not true. Whenever the Right has to produce an actual budget — or anything beyond a “cut spending” slogan — they don’t find significant amounts of waste to eliminate. Instead, they cut Medicaid, which is literally surgeries for uninsured little girls. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. The girls are poor, many are black or Hispanic, and putting them on TV depresses the ratings. So you probably won’t see them.)

The federal budget simply does not have the kind of huge waste the Tea Party imagines. When the government credit card maxes out, are we going to tell our soldiers in Afghanistan to shoot less? Ask seniors to eat cat food and stop taking pills until we get things sorted out? Close the courts? Stop inspecting food or nuclear power plants? Furlough FBI agents and hope Al Qaeda doesn’t notice? Open the federal prisons so the inmates can start supporting themselves? Close the CDC and hope no major plagues erupt before we get it open again? Take our chances on hurricanes and earthquakes without FEMA?

No? Well what, then?

I can’t pick any one of those things and say, “This will happen”, because we could imagine making that particular thing the first priority. (And if it does happen, we could blame President Obama for not making it the first priority — a position Senator Pat Toomey is already staking out.) Similarly, the maxed-out family could make the mortgage the top priority and hope that their daughter gets better on her own. If she dies or never walks again, you can blame them for that. Or if they pay for her treatment first and lose the house, you can blame them for that instead.

But even if we can’t say exactly what it will be, we can be sure that some desperately vital thing will go unfunded if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, because there just aren’t enough non-desperately-vital things to make up the difference.

Anybody who thinks differently, I believe, has an obligation to tell us specifically what those non-vital things are. They owe us a line-by-line spending plan, one that stays within the debt ceiling without killing anybody — or at the very least, estimates the body count.

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Slate’s Annie Lowry imagines how a treasury default hits the trading markets, and believes (as I do) that Republicans in Congress will quickly get in line once the markets start crashing. A better question is whether anything resolves the situation before that, which I am coming to doubt.

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Salon’s Andrew Leonard makes an obvious point that for some reason isn’t getting any attention: Suppose the government avoids defaulting on its bonds by making debt payments its first priority, and instead defaults on other legal obligations like Social Security. Are the markets going to be reassured by that? Or will investors look at the video of homeless old people and conclude that this country is hopelessly broken?

Do a small-business analogy this time: Suppose I’m a banker who has money in a restaurant. They’re up-to-date on the loan, but I hear they’ve stopped paying their other creditors. Shouldn’t I call that loan in as fast as I can?

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Monday, Standard & Poor’s announced a “negative outlook” for the AAA rating on U.S. government debt, citing not the economy, but the political gridlock that might produce trillion-dollar deficits far into the future.

House Republican leader Eric Cantor jumped on this as a “wake-up call” to cut spending, a talking point widely repeated on the Right. But S&P’s warning is about the deficit, not just spending, and Cantor’s refusal to raise taxes on the wealthy is as much a part of the gridlock as Obama’s unwillingness to cut Medicaid. Each is looking out for his supporters — Obama for the poor, Cantor for the rich.

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One measure of how far to the right the conversation has drifted is that the middle position is represented by David Stockman, who was Ronald Reagan’s controversial young budget director 30 years ago. Remarkably for a conservative, he quotes statistics about how wealth has concentrated since 1979, and then analyzes:

The culprit here was the combination of ultralow rates of interest at the Federal Reserve and ultralow rates of taxation on capital gains. The former destroyed the nation’s capital markets, fueling huge growth in household and business debt, serial asset bubbles and endless leveraged speculation in equities, commodities, currencies and other assets.

At the same time, the nearly untaxed windfall gains accrued to pure financial speculators, not the backyard inventors envisioned by the Republican-inspired capital-gains tax revolution of 1978. And they happened in an environment of essentially zero inflation, the opposite of the double-digit inflation that justified a lower tax rate on capital gains back then — but which is now simply an obsolete tax subsidy to the rich

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Everybody, it seems, hates lobbyists. And every now and then a bipartisan consensus in Congress passes new rules that are supposed to toughen restrictions on lobbyists and clean up the process.

And yet lobbying is a perennial growth industry in Washington. What auto factories used to be to Detroit and steel mills to Pittsburgh, lobbying firms are to D.C. The local economy revolves around them. They may not employ many working-class Washingtonians directly, but how would the city’s bars and restaurants survive without them? Who would build office buildings in Tyson Corners or McMansions in McLean? And what would happen to the metro area’s landscapers and pool-cleaners?

It’s a mystery. Why is it so hard to get a handle on lobbying? How can it be so unpopular and yet so hard to shut down?

This month I got around to reading a great book on lobbying from 2007: So Damn Much Money by Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post. It doesn’t answer those questions directly, but provides a lot of useful insight.

What changed. Kaiser recognizes that American politics has never been clean. But his book’s main point is that both politics and government have changed for the worse since the 1970s, and the growth of lobbying is both a cause and a symptom.

In addition to lobbying, the key elements are:

• cost of campaigns. The first election I followed closely was 1968, when Hubert Humphrey spent something on the order of $7 million and Richard Nixon overwhelmed him with a then-unheard-of $20 million. For 2012, President Obama is planning to raise $1 billion. At all levels, costs have gone up accordingly. As a result, congresspeople spend about half their working days on the phone raising money.
• the “permanent campaign”. Old-time campaigns took up maybe half of the last year of a congressman’s term. Then the signs and slogans went into the closet for a while. But in the current era of 24/7 media and instant polling, the campaign never stops. And so politicians of both parties stay on message, parroting focus-group-tested talking points at all times.
• the end of the independent legislator. This is a perverse result of good intentions: doing away with the seniority system in Congress in the 1970s. Pre-reform, a long-serving representative or senator would become a powerful committee chair. Owing this position to no one but his constituents, he could take independent positions — as when Democratic Senator Fulbright turned against President Johnson’s Vietnam War. Today, all institutional power in Congress comes by way of the party leadership, which explains why we see so many party-line votes.
• avoiding Washington. Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 by running against Washington. Speaker Gingrich pressured all incoming Republican congresspeople not to move their families to D.C., and he shortened the congressional workweek to allow commuting back to the home districts. Democrats similarly kept their families home and commuted to avoid being labeled “creatures of Washington”. Symbolically, this has kept Congress in touch with the people, but it also has the perverse effect that members of Congress don’t know each other. They don’t socialize, their spouses and kids don’t hang out together, and they have no reason to trust each other.
• the “farm league for K Street“. In the old days, the point of running for Congress was to be in Congress. Defeated congressmen sometimes became lobbyists, but that was a pathetic story, not something to emulate. Today, Congress and congressional staffs are like college basketball teams — places to get your ticket punched so that you can turn pro and make real money later. In 2007, Senator Lott resigned with five years left in his term, because otherwise new restrictions would have delayed the start of his lobbying career. According to Kaiser: “In a matter of six weeks, Trent Lott abruptly wound up a thirty-five-year career in Congress, abandoned his constituents in Mississippi, and opened a business that Washington rivals estimated would soon be earning millions of dollars a year.” It’s hard to maintain your independence as a legislator when you’re already auditioning for your next job.

The Founders envisioned Congress as a deliberative body. Voters would send their representatives to the capital, where they would debate and compromise and try to arrive at a common purpose for the nation (much like the Constitutional Convention itself).

That simply can’t happen any more. There’s no time for it, and even if you change a congressperson’s mind, s/he may not have the independence to vote differently. Instead, we have what Eric Alterman calls “kabuki democracy” — a show of deliberation in which senators address the camera, not other senators.

Personalizing the problem. Kaiser has a good trick for knitting an unwieldy mass of information into a readable story: He follows the career of Gerry Cassidy, a lawyer who came to Washington in the late 1960s as a poorly-paid staffer to Senator McGovern, then started a lobbying firm whose early clients were universities, and over the decades has accumulated a fortune of $100 million.

Cassidy is a great choice, because he is not a pure villain. In many ways he resembles Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark — a young man of considerable gifts who simultaneously dreams of being important and of doing good, but who ends up just being important. Where exactly he goes wrong is hard to pinpoint. Cassidy seems to ride the wave of political change rather than steer it, but when you analyze the wave, it seems to be made of nothing more than people like Cassidy.

And that’s a phenomenon we all need to understand if we’re ever going to change things.

Privatizing democracy. Here’s what I conclude after reading Kaiser: Democracy is a much more expensive and effort-consuming process than most of us imagine. Because we aren’t willing to recognize or fund that work, it gets done privately. And the private funders take advantage of their role to steer our government for their own benefit.

Let me unpack that. Naively, democracy works through elected representatives doing the people’s will. But, as Lippmann pointed out in the opening quote, “the people’s will” doesn’t become actionable (and may not even exist) until after somebody does a lot of work. Who?

The people, for example, may broadly want access to health care. But how does that shared desire turn into a plan of action? And how does that plan then become an Affordable Care Act that a person can be for or against? (I didn’t work on it. Did you?) Once the ACA exists, who educates the public about what’s in it, so that they can approve or disapprove? Who measures the resulting public opinion and organizes it into pressure that a legislator can feel, or into support s/he can ride to re-election?

In simpler times, legislators did much of this work themselves. With the help of a small staff, they studied issues, intuited public opinion, wrote legislation, rounded up colleagues to support it, and wrote speeches and newsletters to promote or denounce the outcome.

There’s no time for that any more. The issues have gotten more complex and the science of manipulating public opinion more resource-consuming. Staffs have grown, but not nearly enough to keep pace. Legislators have their hands full reciting talking points on TV and raising money for the next election.

Who fills the vacuum? Not corporate-funded journalists, who have become another part of the problem. (But that’s a subject for another week.) So: lobbyists, privately funded think tanks, high-priced pollsters and political consultants. They write the legislation, convene the focus groups, and produce the talking points. They organize the demonstrations and make sure the TV cameras are pointed in the right direction. And ultimately, they fund and produce the election campaigns.

In short, the work democracy requires — the enormous effort needed to turn vague popular desires into programs and laws that can pass through Congress — is being done by privately funded groups. Some of them, on some issues, promote the public interest. But most are working in the interest of their funders. Why wouldn’t they?

And that explains why we haven’t been able to get rid of them: They are corruptly doing work that ought to be done honestly, but which in any case needs to get done somehow. Until we figure out how to get that work done without them, they’ll always sneak back into the process.

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If friends or relatives keep forwarding you stuff about where President Obama was born, send them here.

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Mohamed ElBaradei, who headed the International Atomic Energy Agency during the run-up to the Iraq War (and who more recently played a role in the Egyptian uprising) just wrote a book. ElBaradei had to deal with countries like North Korea, but he saves some of his harshest words for the Bush administration:

“I was aghast at what I was witnessing,” ElBaradei writes of the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls “aggression where there was no imminent threat,” a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.

In such a case, he suggests, the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, “should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a `war crime’ and determine who is accountable?”

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Wisconsin update: Recall petitions have been filed on five Republican and three Democratic state senators. The signatures are being validated, but if they hold up, new elections will be held in these eight districts. Democrats need to pick up three seats to gain control.

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Slate’s Farhad Manjoo explains Prosper.com, where strangers lend each other money over the internet. My first reaction was “That’s crazy.” But maybe not.

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Somebody close to you has been keeping a secret file of all the places you go together. It’s your iPhone.

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At age 11, boys and girls are equally likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders. At age 15, girls are six times more likely. The different explanations of this phenomenon are a Rorschach test on attitudes about gender: Female hormones. Society’s impossible demands on adolescent girls. Or a lack of empathy for teen-age boys turns their anxiety disorders into anger-management problems.

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Slate’s Dahlia LIthwick says that for practical purposes, Roe v Wade isn’t the law any more. State legislatures are boldly passing laws that violate it, and pro-choice organizations are afraid to take these cases to the Supreme Court.

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Publicly funded campaigns are part of the solution for fixing Congress, but that’s not all the work that needs to get done. And public funding to do the rest of it — like organize and develop public opinion, or educate the public about proposed legislation — could rapidly turn into 1984’s Ministry of Truth. Brainstorm some alternatives. How does the work of democracy get done in a way that is independent of both the incumbent government and the special interests?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

“Is this a game of chance?”

“Not the way I play it.”

— W. C. Fields, “My Little Chickadee” (1940)

In this week’s Sift:

• Heads They Win, Tales You Lose. The conservative movement trumpets its principles. But those principles are easily reversed when they disadvantage the rich or benefit Democrats.
• Betting on Bachmann. For months I’ve been looking at the Republican 2012 field and saying that none of them can possibly win the nomination. Now I’ve spotted the first candidate who can, and she’s not who you think.
• Short Notes. Wish I could tell you something about the possibility of a government shutdown. Budget ignorance. Defending regulation. Walker wriggles, then finally decides to obey a court order. Wisconsin votes tomorrow, and may vote again when all the recall petitions are validated. Jon Stewart identifies what kind of people corporations are. Save the tree octopus! Televising Katie Couric’s colonoscopy. A radiation chart. A Fox News confession. And Corning’s cool-but-creepy vision of the future.
• This Week’s Challenge. Here’s wishing a unchallenging week to all of us.

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There are some honest and principled differences in American politics. Some people really believe that a newly fertilized ovum has the same moral value as a baby. Some people believe less government is always better. Some believe that America has both the ability and the moral responsibility to install democracies in troubled countries. Some believe that an unfettered free market system would be so productive as to make up for its other failings.

I don’t believe any of those things. But I know people who do, and they seem to be sincere about it.

Those aren’t the people I want to talk about right now. Instead, I want to focus on all the situations where a principle is held sacred when it benefits the right people, and yet is easily reversed when it benefits the wrong people.

Small government. Rachel Maddow has been beating this drum for some while now, but she really pulled it all together on Tuesday night’s show (video, transcript). Conservative rhetoric is all about small government. But in practice conservatives love big government when they can use it to force their values on others or hassle people they don’t like.

The issue where Rachel usually makes this point is abortion, where legislators who supposedly favor small government have no trouble forcing women to attend anti-abortion counseling sessions or to view an ultrasound of their fetus. But Tuesday she showed how the same phenomenon plays out in many other issues.

So: Florida Governor Rick Scott has just signed an order mandating quarterly drug tests for state workers. This will cost the state a lot of money (much of which will go to a company Scott’s wife owns, which does drug tests), is not based on any state-worker drug scandal, and is unconstitutional as well — but it’s anti-drug and hassles state workers, so it’s all good.

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is another big-government conservative:

If the Snyder administration so declares, if they declare a financial emergency in your town, a financial emergency czar will be appointed, not elected by you, but appointed, sent to your town, given the power to abolish your town. The town can be dissolved on the say so of the governor‘s financial emergency person. Anyone you elected locally to represent you can be dismissed. All contracts, all unions, all rights of people who worked for that town can be dissolved on one person‘s say so if Governor Rick Snyder gives the nod. He is taking that much power.

Rachel then moved to the Republican effort to get access to the emails of Wisconsin history Professor William Cronon:

taking a law designed to make law transparent to the public and instead using it to force into the public e-mails written by a university professor whose academic writings put him on the wrong side of the Republican Party on an issue they feel quite sensitive about.

You speak out, the government will use all the leverage it can muster over you to pry open your life.

This isn’t a one-of-a-kind thing:

in Virginia, it has been Governor McDonnell‘s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, who has demanded to search e-mails of a Virginia science professor, a professor whose research on climate issues apparently did not meet with government approval.

And back in Michigan:

The labor studies faculty at the University of Michigan, at Wayne State University, and at Michigan State have all just had their e-mails demanded by a right wing think tank, specifically demanding to see any e-mail from any professor at the labor faculty at any of these schools, any e-mail that includes the words: Scott Walker, Wisconsin, Madison, or Maddow.

Yep, mention Rachel in an email, and you’re on the target list. About all this, she asks:

Is that small, leave-me-alone government, or is that big, intrusive government?

Money in politics. In the Citizens United decision of 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money campaigning for or against political candidates. The logic behind the decision was basically that free speech is good, and more money in a campaign means more speech. By limiting what corporations could spend, laws like McCain-Feingold were restricting how much free speech voters could hear.

Now, there are a lot of ways to argue against this point of view. (I’m reminded of the Anatole France quote I have used to lead off the Sift before: “The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Well, the Supreme Court demonstrates its even-handedness by allowing the poor as well as the rich to spend unlimited amounts of money on politics.) But you could at least imagine that someone might hold it honestly.

Now we get to McCommish v Bennett, which the Supremes are mulling over now. The gist of this case is Arizona’s law providing public financing for campaigns for state offices. Arizona has had a long history of political scandals, and the public-financing law (passed by voter referendum) was seen as a way to create the possibility for a candidate to get elected without taking vast sums from special interests.

The system works like this: A candidate for a contested office gets a fixed amount of public money in exchange for promising not to raise and spend additional money. Candidates who opt out of the system remain free to raise and spend as much as they want. But if they do spend more than the amount allowed to their publicly financed rivals, the amount of public funding goes up.

The idea here was that the public-funding system would not be attractive if it were essentially a strait-jacket that forced a candidate to spend less than his privately financed rivals. So as the amount of private spending goes up, the amount of public spending goes up.

So: Everyone is still free to buy as much free speech as he or she can afford. The only thing you can’t do is swamp your publicly financed rivals with private money. The public is just adding money to the campaign, and more money equals more speech. So the courts should be happy. The 9th Court of Appeals, whose ruling is being appealed to the Supremes, is happy:

there is no First Amendment right to make one’s opponent speak less, nor is there a First Amendment right to prohibit the government from subsidizing one’s opponent, especially when the same subsidy is available to the challenger if the challenger accepts the same terms as his opponent.

In particular the five conservative judges who wrote the Citizens United decision should be happy. But it looks like they’re not.

Nothing has been decided so far, but in the questions they have raised during public hearings, the five conservative justices seem to be positioning themselves to overturn the appeals-court decision and declare Arizona’s system unconstitutional.

The problem? While rich people can spend as much as they want, the fact that their spending could trigger more funding for a candidate they hate might inhibit them. The whole point of spending vast amounts is to swamp your poorer opponent, and if the law takes that option away, why would a rich person spend? So Justice Kennedy (usually the swing vote on the Court) asked: “Do you think it would be a fair characterization of this law to say that its purpose and its effect are to produce less speech in political campaigns?”

Slate’s Richard Hasen comments:

If you are looking for a common thread between the “more speech is better” theory underlying Citizens United and an expected “more speech is unfair” ruling for the challengers in McComish, it is this: Five conservatives justices on the Supreme Court appear to have no problem with the wealthy using their resources to win elections—even if doing so raises the danger of increased corruption of the political system.

Property Rights. Matt Yglesias nailed this one:

If I walked over to David Koch’s lawn and tore up all the grass, he’d probably feel that the basic principles of a free market society require me to be punished. After all, that’s his property. … And yet somehow the coalition merchants of the contemporary right, financed by the Kochs and other industrialists, have constructed a conception of free markets and property rights such that trying to stop them from wrecking Ouachita River constitutes a defense of those things.

Their property rights allow them to defend their property, but if they use their property to harm the public’s property, property rights protect them then too.

Taxes and health care. Again and again in discussions of the budget deficit, conservatives have argued that tax cuts don’t have to be offset. In other words, deficits are only bad when they are caused by spending. When a deficit is caused by tax cuts, that’s fine.

That’s very close to a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument right there, but it gets worse. There are a number of taxes included in the Affordable Care Act. There is general agreement that some of them were poorly designed and should be changed or even eliminated. But Republicans are adamant that any lost revenue needs to be made up. So: tax cuts don’t have to be offset with spending cuts, unless we’re talking about cutting spending on health care.

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This week I had a strong temptation to open an account on InTrade, the predictive-market exchange that lets you bet on all kinds of political developments. The reason? Earlier this week, shares that would pay $10 if Michelle Bachmann gets the 2012 Republican nomination were going for 50 cents.

But the mainstream media discovered the Bachmann candidacy this week, so this morning her shares were up to 70 cents. But they’ve got a lot further to run.

I’m not saying I’m sure she’s going to win the nomination. But I will predict this much:

• Mitt Romney will not be nominated. Yes, his campaign will have plenty of money, he looks like central-casting’s idea of a president, and Republicans have a history of nominating the person who finished second last time around. But it’s not going to happen. From the beginning, the religious right has had trouble trusting a Mormon, and he isn’t going to be able to explain the difference between ObamaCare and RomneyCare (because there isn’t one). His rivals can attack Romney and Obama in the same sentence, and that’s going to be deadly when the campaign starts in earnest.
• Sarah Palin will not run. I’ve been saying this for months. Campaigning is hard work, and you spend money rather than make it. Then if you get elected, you have to work even harder at governing (unless you quit). But being a Fox News pundit from your home studio, letting somebody else ghost-write your books, and tossing off an occasional tweet while you watch the money roll in … that’s more Sarah’s style.
• Bachmann will win the Iowa caucuses. The same stuff that works on Republicans in Minnesota works in Iowa. Her only competition for the religious-right vote is Huckabee, and easy-going Huck can’t channel the mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-any-more wave as well as Bachmann can.
• At some point it’s going to come down to Bachmann against one or two other Republican candidates. She wins Iowa, somebody else upsets Romney in New Hampshire, and maybe there’s a third candidate who finished close enough in both to keep going.

Put all that together, and I’d be amazed if those Bachmann shares didn’t make it to at least $3 at some point.

Now, I know some of you will think this is a crazy idea. Michelle Bachmann is one of the outright loons in the Republican Party. She is only slightly more knowledgable than Palin, and occasionally gets this wild-eyed look that should scare the pants off any sane voter.

But if you think that eliminates her from consideration for high office, you haven’t been paying attention. Bachmann is a level-headed genius compared to Christine O’Donnell, who beat a sensible Republican in the Delaware senate primary. From my perspective, Bachmann is the only Republican candidate so far who doesn’t immediately bring to mind some reason he or she can’t win the nomination.

The religious right and the rank-and-file Tea Partiers (mostly the same people, in spite of the media coverage saying otherwise) are looking for a candidate with authenticity. They have a semi-justified/semi-paranoid fear that candidates are saying things they don’t really believe just to woo them. So they are looking for conviction, and they are looking for details in a candidate’s biography that show seriousness about religious-right issues. Newt Gingrich can talk about defending marriage, but he’s on his third wife. Romney is a Mormon who supported socialized medicine. Even Huckabee looks like somebody who would play nice with the Marxist-atheist Democrats in Congress.

If you believe all the crazy stuff religious-right Tea-Party people believe, and you want somebody who says that stuff proudly in public, someone who will stand up against the reality-based folks who say you’re crazy — then you want Bachmann. What looks like craziness to liberals is actually just shamelessness; Bachmann will state as fact whatever she wants to be true. That’s a virtue on the right these days.

Meanwhile, she doesn’t offend the other power bases in the Republican Party. Corporatists like the Koch brothers have always been suspicious of Huckabee. (What if he really means all that Christian-compassion stuff?) But Bachmann makes the big-bucks crowd comfortable. (That’s how she manages to raise so much money). And the neocons don’t have anything against her either.

The only Republicans who would mount a defend-the-Alamo campaign against Bachmann are the sane ones — the ones who want to appeal to the center and beat Obama. But in a Republican primary, they’re nowhere near a majority any more.

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Will Congress make a deal to avoid a government shutdown next week? This is important enough to deserve an article, but I have no idea.

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The whole budget issue would be much easier to handle if the American people had any idea what the government really spends money on.

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First-time poster ramblinman explains The Case for Regulation on Daily Kos. This is the kind of common-sense justification liberals need to do more often:

The simple contradiction, my conservative friend, is this: You can not make the selfish man the paradigm of your economic theory and then expect that same selfish man to self regulate.

He makes the analogy to sports: It’s only a fair competition if there are rules and an impartial referee.

So don’t tell me about watering the tree of liberty and a tossed salad of incompatible isms. Just tell me if you accept my sports analogy, and if not, what is it about economic competition that makes it so fundamentally different from sport competition that no rules are required.

In a comment I pushed his analogy a little further:

The rulebook of football is huge and complicated. It has to be, because a lot of very competitive people are doing whatever they can to get an advantage. Why would anyone think that the rules of economic competition could be simpler?

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To the surprise of no one, Judge Maryann Sumi was not pleased that the Walker administration in Wisconsin started implementing its new union-killing bill in spite of her restraining order. The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

“Apparently that language was either misunderstood or ignored, but what I said was, ‘the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 is enjoined,’ ” Sumi said. “That’s what I now want to make crystal clear. … Now that I’ve made my earlier order as clear as it possibly can be, I must state that those who act in open and willful defiance of the court order place not only themselves at peril of sanctions, they also jeopardize the financial and the governmental stability of the state of Wisconsin.”

A spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Justice said, “Whether the Department of Administration or other state officers choose to comply with any direction issued by Judge Sumi is up to them.” But Walker has since backed down from a direct clash with the judiciary.

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Meanwhile, the voters are getting a chance to weigh in. Tomorrow Wisconsin elects a Supreme Court justice, and the main issue is that the incumbent, David Prosser, is a Walker partisan. The dispute over the union-busting law is going to make it to the state Supreme Court soon, so the race is nearly a referendum on it.

Another vote to watch tomorrow is the election for Walker’s old job: Milwaukee County executive. The Democrat was a sizable underdog until he started linking his opponent to Walker. Now, who knows?

The effort to recall Republican state senators has had its first success: A petition calling for a recall of La Crosse Senator Dan Kapanke was filed Friday, apparently with enough signatures to trigger a recall election. It won’t be the last.

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Jon Stewart responds to the idea that corporations — 2/3rds of whom pay nothing in corporate income taxes already — need a tax break, or they’ll ship jobs overseas even faster than they already are.

I know the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, but what I didn’t realize is that those people are assholes.

But if Jon read the Sift, he would have known since December that Corporations are Sociopaths.

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The University of Connecticut studied internet gullibility by assigning students to write a report about the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus — which has never existed. (You can’t get more endangered than that.) Researching the topic was easy, because the UConn researchers had also put up a web site to publicize the plight of the tree octopus. Students easily Googled up the fake site and wrote their report about “this intelligent and inquisitive cephalopod”, with most having no idea they had been scammed. (The tree octopus gift shop was a nice touch.)

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Katie Couric combines serious with hilarious when she brings a camera crew along for her colonoscopy.

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xkcd produces a chart to help us keep our radiation dangers in perspective.

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A Fox News executive admits to saying things on camera that he didn’t really believe during the 2008 campaign. He’s not sorry; he’s just letting his fellow conservatives in on the joke.

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Corning’s vision of the near future: A Day Made of Glass. Sort of cool, sort of creepy. Do you really want email showing up on the bathroom mirror while you brush your teeth?

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I’m hoping for an unchallenging week myself, so I’ll wish one to everybody else.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

Step by step the longest march can be won.
Many stones can make an arch, singly none.
And by union what we will can be accomplished still.
Drops of water turn a mill, singly none.

— Ruthie Gorton

In this week’s Sift:

• Union Busting in Wisconsin. The confrontation between Wisconsin’s Tea Party governor and public employee unions is about power, not money.
• How to Speak Conservative: American Exceptionalism. Another in my ongoing series about conservative jargon that usually leaves liberals scratching their heads.
• Short Notes. Follow-up on last week’s “Private Sector Covert Ops”. Curveball confesses. The weak field of Obama-challengers. Dr. Cuddy supports abortion rights. Anti-abortion terrorism is working. Envisioning high-speed rail. And the Web lets you generate your own Beck-style conspiracy theory.
• This Week’s Challenge. A new feature of the Sift: something to think about each week. This week: In the future, how will work-that-needs-doing turn into jobs?

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The confrontation in Wisconsin has gotten a lot more national attention since I wrote about it last week. Some of the reporting is quite good, and I won’t repeat it all here. A few points are worth underlining.

This is about power, not money. Usually when somebody says “It’s not about the money”, it’s about the money. Here, though, money is a pretext.

Leaders of the public-employee unions say they’re willing to accept the financial concessions in Gov. Walker’s bill, just not the slashing of the workers’ rights to organize and bargain. No dice, the Governor says.

Rachel Maddow does a good job of painting the larger picture. The Citizens United decision makes corporate and union spending key to financing campaigns. And that makes it key for Republicans to take down the unions, so that all Citizens-United funding will flow to them. “In terms of large-scale money spent in elections, unions are the only competition that Republicans have.”

That’s why Walker exempted police and firefighters — unions that supported him — from the new rules. But the cops and firemen are too smart to trust him not to take their rights away later on. Firefighters symbolically marched into the Capitol to join the protestors. And the head of one police union posted (and then later pulled down, for complex reasons explained here) this statement:

I specifically regret the endorsement of the Wisconsin Trooper’s Association for Gov. Scott Walker. I regret the governor’s decision to ‘endorse’ the troopers and inspectors of the Wisconsin State Patrol. I regret being the recipient of any of the perceived benefits provided by the governor’s anointing.

The crisis was manufactured. There are two budget situations in Wisconsin. The current two-year budget, which runs through June, has a $137 million shortfall. It’s not unusual to have a budget repair bill to make up the difference. But Governor Walker’s “repair bill” also contains sweeping policy changes that in a fairly short time could destroy Wisconsin’s public employee unions. (It also gives Walker the ability to change state medical assistance programs without going back to the legislature.)

That’s not a side effect, that’s the point. Walker manufactured this shortfall with corporate tax give-aways precisely so that he could submit this “repair” bill and take away workers’ rights.

The second situation, the $3 billion gap you sometimes hear about, is in the early projections of the next two-year budget. Governor Walker has not even submitted an official budget yet, so an estimates of the shortfall Wisconsin faces in the next cycle are just speculation. The Wisconsin budget process has produced worse projections than this before, and the legislature has worked them out without taking away anyone’s rights.

It’s not just Wisconsin. Similar union-busting is in the works in Ohio, Tennessee, and several other states. Basically, any state with a Republican governor is using the current fiscal problem as an excuse to bust its public-employee unions.

Numbers. In spite of Fox News’ effort to hype it, the Tea Party counter-protest was a big disappointment. The pro-Walker group was out-numbered about 35-to-1.

Bug-freedom. Conservatives don’t see the contradiction in an allegedly freedom-loving Tea Party governor taking away people’s rights, because they don’t see collective bargaining as a right at all. Freedom, to them, is only about individuals.

Whenever folks start using the rhetoric of liberty, it’s important to pinpoint which kind of freedom they’re talking about. In the fall, in my review of Merchants of Doubt, I described the distinction between lamb-freedom and wolf-freedom: Wolf-freedom means tearing down the barriers that make lamb-freedom possible. Your children’s freedom to drink from the tap ends when a corporation is free to pollute the water supply.

Well, there’s also bug-freedom: the right to stay small and get squished. Bug-freedom is more than just the right not to belong to a union, it also includes the right to go without health insurance, the right to finance your own retirement without Social Security, and other similar rights.

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Daily Kos’ AlecMN debunks a bunch of myths about teachers unions and education.

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The pro-Walker TV ads (which the Club for Growth had ready to go immediately — they knew the plan) are appalling:

All across Wisconsin, people are making sacrifices to keep their jobs. Frozen wages. Pay cuts. And paying more for health care. But state workers haven’t had to sacrifice. … It’s not fair. … It’s time state employees paid their fair share.

The longer radio ad has the same basic structure, but goes on to list the Wisconsin businesses where workers have sacrificed “to keep their jobs” and says, “Everywhere you look, people are sharing the load. But state workers have been exempt in these tough times.”

The response to this is so obvious: It isn’t people who are sacrificing, it’s working people. Billionaires didn’t have to give up the Bush tax cuts. Corporate profits are up. Wall Street is soaring and big bonuses are back. But we’re supposed to ignore all that and be jealous of teachers and nurses. Private-sector workers are getting screwed by their employers, so they should want public-sector workers to get screwed too.

“frozen wages, pay cuts, and paying more for health care” — private-sector workers are supposed to want that trend to continue?

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Conservatives from Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to CNN’s Kathleen Parker know what’s really wrong with Barack Obama: He doesn’t believe in “American exceptionalism”. What are they talking about?

Like class warfare, American exceptionalism used to mean one thing and now it’s being used to mean something else, something you have to pick up from usage, because it’s hardly ever defined. It’s like the beatnik or hippie slang of the 50s and 60s — if you have to ask for a definition, you obviously don’t get it.

Origins. Let’s start with the original meaning. As far back as De Tocqueville’s 1831 classic Democracy in America, political scientists have observed that America was created by a unique set of circumstances:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.

It’s like in the comic books: The formula for creating super-soldiers died with its inventor, so the prototype — Captain America — is the only one you’re ever going to see.

What are those unique circumstances? These two pop to mind: (1) The American colonies were founded on a democratic model from the beginning, so there was no prior aristocracy to overthrow. That’s how we avoided the horrors of the French or Russian Revolutions. (2) The richly-endowed continent at our backs meant that during our formative decades we could have a pro-business climate without developing a correspondingly large underclass. Ambitious people who couldn’t find opportunity could push farther west.

The upshot of the original meaning of American exceptionalism is that another country can’t just adopt the American constitution and expect to become America. It’s a notion that would cast doubt on ambitious nation-building exercises like we’re seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that’s not how conservatives use the term today.

The city on a hill. More recently, the phrase American exceptionalism has picked up a second meaning whose roots go back even farther, but which runs almost exactly opposite. In this version, America has a unique mission to provide an example to the world.

Historically, the image that has stood for this idea is the city on a hill. It goes back to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it gives light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

The image has been associated with America since Jonathan Winthrop in 1630. Speaking to the pilgrims about to disembark and found the city of Boston, Winthrop urged them to bring their best, most Christian behavior to the new colony:

for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us

In 1783 in Philadelphia, on that day that Congress ratified the peace treaty with Great Britain, Thomas Paine envisioned a grand mission for the new country:

To see it in our power to make a world happy — to teach mankind the art of being so — to exhibit on the theatre of the universe, a character hitherto unknown — and to have, as it were, a new creation entrusted to our hands, are honors that command reflection.

Just before leaving Boston for his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy quoted Winthrop to the Massachusetts legislature, and then said:

For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: “We do not imitate — for we are a model to others.” … Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us — and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill

Triumphalism. In 1974, once-and-future presidential candidate Ronald Reagan added another image to the mix. His speech was called “The Shining City Upon a Hill“, a phrase he used often in his career, including his farewell address in 1989. He attributes it to Winthrop, but in fact shining is nowhere in Winthrop’s quote, and Jesus talks about the candle shining, not the city. But the Bible does have a shining city: the New Jerusalem from Revelation 21.

So in the Spirit he carried me to the top of a vast, lofty mountain, and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of Heaven from God, and bringing with it the glory of God. It shone with a radiance like that of a very precious stone.

The city on a hill has to be on its best behavior because it “cannot be hid”. But the New Jerusalem is God’s gift at the end of time, not a human city that needs to work to build its future. Where Kennedy and Winthrop emphasized the city on the hill’s responsibility, Reagan’s hybrid image emphasized its glory. We are not so much challenged by Reagan’s God as favored by Him. And we deserve this favor, Reagan implied, because of our virtues:

I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.

Reagan’s speech is triumphalist, trumpeting the glories of America:

One-half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has taken place in this republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely among our people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours for a higher standard of living than any other people …

… and so on at considerable length, concluding that:

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall of Philadelphia … we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

[As an aside, you can see a similar triumphalist shift in the way “America the Beautiful” is often sung today. Originally, “God shed His grace on thee” was a prayer, not a statement of accomplished fact. The unspoken helping verb is may, not has: “may God shed” not “God has shed”. That intention is apparent in the next verb: “crown thy good” not “crowned thy good”; it goes with may, not has.]

Rogue nation. George W. Bush pushed Reagan’s triumphalism a little further: America is exceptional in the sense that rules do not apply to us. We can invade other nations. We can grab the citizens of other countries and torture them. Such things would be wrong if other nations did them, but America is the exception.

Similarly, the conservative hostility to international law is rooted in this rogue-nation version of exceptionalism. If the US were to submit to international rules, if we had to “seek a permission slip” from the UN “to defend the security of our people” — that would be admitting that we were just another country, and not exceptional.

At the extreme, America is exempted from all requirements of reality, and can make any claim it wants regardless of facts. For example: We have “the best healthcare system in the world.”

These are the “exceptions” that foreigners think of when they hear us talk about American exceptionalism. To them, it is a claim that we define reality, so we can do anything we want. And that is why President Obama is reluctant to use the phrase.

What it should mean to liberals. De Tocqueville’s version of “American exceptionalism” is worth tossing around the next time conservatives start talking about another democracy-by-force crusade. It should confuse them.

And liberals should not shy away from the Winthrop/Kennedy version of city-on-a-hill. It’s a myth, but myths of this sort can be good when they call on people to rise above the average. They only become destructive when they justify privilege rather than responsibility. That’s what’s wrong with the Reagan/Bush additions to the myth. To believe that America should be the country that leads the world in all good things — that’s all positive. To believe that we are and always will be the greatest, no matter how we behave or what the facts of the matter are — that’s pernicious.

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I promised a follow-up on last week’s “Private Sector Covert Ops” about the recently leaked proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to attack its liberal enemies, including the threat to make Glenn Greenwald “choose career preservation” rather than continue supporting WikiLeaks.

The best account I’ve found of this from a not-directly-involved source is on Wired’s Threat Level blog. The picture they paint reminds me of the layers of deniability built into organizations like the Mafia: Big corporations contribute to the Chamber of Commerce so that it can do their dirty work. The Chamber has a relationship with a big law firm, Hunton & Williams, which hears the proposal from the private-sector spooks, HBGary.

What did Tony Soprano know? You’ll never prove anything.

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It’s official: The Iraq War was based on lies. The informant codenamed “Curveball” now admits that he made up his reports about Saddam’s mobile biological weapons labs. This is who Colin Powell was talking about when he made the Bush administration’s case to the UN:

We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. … The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities. He actually was present during biological agent production runs.

Now that chemical engineer admits it was all bogus: “I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that.”

Colin Powell’s people are less pleased.

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Nate Silver puts numbers around something we all feel instinctively: The Republicans have a weak field of challengers to President Obama.

Nate verifies this by looking at net favorability: the percentage of the population who views the candidate favorably minus the percentage with an unfavorable view. Normally, a viable presidential candidate has a high net favorability rating at this point in the process. Maybe not everybody has heard of him or her, but those who have are impressed.

George W. Bush was at +47 in early 1999, closely followed by Elizabeth Dole at +41. In 2007, Barack Obama was at +27, Rudy Giuliani at +30, and even Hillary Clinton — whose high negatives worried Democrats — was +2.

This year, Huckabee (who might not run) is +8, Romney +4, and everybody else at zero or below.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have two candidates in Ms. Palin and Mr. Gingirch whose net favorability ratings are actually in the double-digit negatives, something which since 2000 had only been true of Pat Buchanan and Al Sharpton.

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LIsa Edelstein, who runs the hospital on the TV show House, stars in an abortion-rights ad asking “Why is the GOP trying to send women back to the back alley?” The visuals are simple and effective: Edelstein takes a slow walk down a dream-like hallway, then opens a closet door and stares meaningfully at a wire hanger.

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Rachel Maddow points out that at least one kind of terrorism is working in America: Ever since the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion terrorist in 2009, there have been no abortion doctors in Wichita. A service that is legal in Wichita is nonetheless unavailable because providers have been successfully terrorized.

Rachel takes the right tack on this: No matter what you think about abortion, do you want America to be the kind of country where murder is an effective political tactic?

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Gonzeaux does a thought experiment: If you were in downtown Dallas and wanted to get to downtown Houston, would you do better to drive, fly, or take the kind of high-speed rail President Obama wants to build? When you think it through in detail, it’s pretty obvious you’d want the train.

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There’s no need to watch Glenn Beck when the Web can generate conspiracy theories on its own.

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This is a new feature of the Weekly Sift. Every week I’m going to end with an issue to think about — something where I don’t have the answer, I’m just raising the question. Feel free to email me answers or post them as comments on the Weekly Sift blog.

This week’s challenge occurred to me while I was reading about post-Katrina New Orleans. People were slow to move back New Orleans, the article claimed, because there were no jobs. Let that paradox rattle around in your brain for a while: In this ruined city, a place where there was more work to be done than anywhere in America, there were no jobs.

To me, that’s not just an indictment of our economic system, it’s a microcosm of the biggest economic problem we face going forward: There is no end to the work will need to be done. But how will that work turn into jobs?

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)

In this week’s Sift:

• How to Speak Conservative: Class Warfare. When Republicans charged that repealing the Bush tax cuts would be “class warfare”, they seemed to believe they were packing a lot into those two words. They were.
• Is Health Reform Unconstitutional? One federal judge thinks so. Two others don’t. The issues are simple but fundamental, and only the Supreme Court can decide them.
• Short Notes. DADT is gone and soon to be forgotten. A Patriot takes up retail to sell his own jersey. How Newt Gingrich raises money. When great athletes shared in public sacrifices. The 2012 primaries are shaping up to be wild. Cheaper food doesn’t necessarily raise quality of life. Another damning Fox News leak. And how to wrap a cat for Christmas.

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Tuesday, as Congress debated the (now passed) tax compromise, Politico’s chief political correspondent Roger Simon wrote a piece called Class Warfare is not the Ticket in which he claimed:

Congressional Democrats want us to hate the rich for being rich.

Class warfare is one of those phrases in American politics that a dictionary will not help you decipher. Like appeasement, quagmire, political correctness, and a handful of other loaded terms, its meaning comes not from a definition, but from a long history of usage. Such terms evoke not just concepts, but entire stories with settings and plots and characters.

If you don’t happen to be part of the subculture that uses the phrases and tells the stories, you can easily get lost: What are these people talking about? How do they get from A to M to Z without mentioning any of the letters in between?

Simon, for example, quotes no congressional Democrats saying anything hateful about the rich. It’s just not necessary. (It’s also probably not possible. I didn’t hear a lot of tycoon-and-debutante-bashing during the tax debate. The main thing Senator Bernie Sanders was saying during his filibuster was that cutting rich people’s taxes doesn’t help the economy.) It’s not necessary because hatred of the rich is a long-standing part of the story of class warfare. Once an issue has been identified as class warfare, it goes without saying that one side hates the rich.

The same process is at work in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, where Peter Wehner writes:

One cannot help but conclude that even if lower tax rates for the wealthy led to strong economic growth, more jobs, and a higher standard of living for everyone, it wouldn’t matter. Punishing “the rich” would remain a top priority.

What started Wehner down the road from which “one cannot help but” reach this remarkable conclusion? He quotes Senator Mary Landrieu saying that her opposition to the tax deal “is about justice and doing what’s right.” Apparently Wehner can imagine no other meaning for these words than that Landrieu wants to punish the rich — even if it hurts everybody else too.

History and mythology. So what is the class-warfare story and what does it have to do with the Bush tax cuts? Class warfare is one translation of the German klassenkämpfen used by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto of 1848:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. … [O]ppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Lenin and Stalin turned Marxism into Soviet Communism, which often did result in “the common ruin of the contending classes.” (The killing fields of Cambodia is one outstanding example.) As a result, in American politics the term class warfare is now used only on the Right, as a way of identifying the Left with ruinously destructive policies.

As it is used on the Right, class warfare refers to poor and middle-class people who are so overwhelmed by their envy of the rich that tearing the rich down is an end in itself. Identifying a policy as class warfare implies that envy of the rich is its real motivation, and so invokes a morality tale in which a desire to harm others rebounds against the person who harbors the desire. Rand Paul, for example, said:

You can’t punish rich people. You end up punishing the people who work for them, or you punish the people who they buy things from. It makes no sense

Hating the rich doesn’t hurt them, the class-warfare story claims, it just hurts the haters and their communities. But the haters are so far gone that they don’t care; they’ll destroy themselves and everyone around them in their effort to destroy the rich.

(Liberals sometimes try to turn the phrase back on conservatives, arguing that conservative policies that hurt the poor are class warfare. We can see now why this response never hits home: Obviously the rich aren’t spiteful about the poor. They’d happily forget about the poor.)

If you want to understand the emotional essence of the class-warfare myth, you need to read some of the classic right-wing novels, like Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s world, we’re not even really talking about the rich any more, we’re talking about the Best People — the talented, motivated visionaries. Just by being better than everybody else, they become targets of spite and envy.

The Fountainhead‘s hero, for example, is Howard Roark, a visionary architect who lives simply and (due to his own uncompromising idealism combined with persecution by people like the wannabee-great-architect Peter Keating) never gets rich. Atlas Shrugged‘s hero John Galt is an inventor who could have gotten rich, but decides instead to lead a strike of the world’s productive geniuses, leaving the envious wannabees to flounder in a failing world economy. (The productive geniuses follow Galt because they don’t really care about money either. They just want the freedom to produce ingeniously.)

So the full class-warfare myth goes like this: Some people are better than the rest of us. They are smarter, more insightful, more driven, and more talented in a thousand different ways. Because American society is free, these people rise to the top and achieve the success they so richly deserve. But in doing so they draw the attention of spiteful people who lack the virtues that make the best people successful. These envious wannabees will try to tear the best people down to their level — even if they have to tear down the rest of society to do it. And they will have to tear down the rest of society, because the success of everybody depends on that small number of productive visionaries.

The unpopularity of class warfare. Naturally, when you lay it out that way, more people identify with the productive geniuses than with the no-talent haters. This is Roger Simon’s point:

Some Democrats hate the rich. Most Americans, on the other hand, would like to become the rich. … Which is why class warfare doesn’t work in America and why congressional Democrats are being stupid. In America, the class structure is fluid. You don’t have to stay in the economic class into which you were born. People don’t really hate the rich, and we don’t really want to confiscate their wealth.

I imagine he’s completely correct. If we had a referendum asking “Should the government confiscate the wealth of anyone with more than X dollars?” I’m sure it would fail, no matter how big X was.

Envy is not a big motive for most Americans, and to the extent it is, we feel guilty about it. We certainly don’t want to march in the streets for envy and build a political movement around spite. If we feel like we’re getting a fair shake, and that people in general are getting fair shake, then the fact that somewhere there are 400-foot yachts where people drink 200-year-old wine served by supermodels in bikinis — we don’t care. If they’re not hurting anybody to do it, we even like the idea that somebody is keeping that fantasy alive.

If.

Needed revenue. That’s where the whole class-warfare myth breaks down. What if we don’t feel like we’re getting a fair shake or that people in general are getting a fair shake? What if people are dying of curable diseases because there is no money to pay for their treatment? What if people who want jobs can’t find them? What if teachers are getting laid off, equipment is breaking, and class sizes are growing because there’s no money in the school budget? What if houses are burning down while firemen watch, because of money? What if college is out of reach, even for families that have worked and saved? What if libraries are closing? What if we can’t afford to train special-needs students to be productive citizens in decades to come? What if our bridges are in danger of collapsing and our stadium roofs are falling in? What if we don’t know where our energy is going to come from, and the energy we’re using is pushing us closer to disaster?

An essential piece of the class-warfare interpretation of tax increases is that we don’t actually need the revenue. Government is just a big black hole into which we pitch our taxes.

So take that, rich people. I’m going to flush your money down the tax hole. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

But if important things are going undone for lack of revenue, or if we can only do them by writing IOUs that future generations will have to make good, then raising taxes on those who can afford to pay is just good sense. What’s childish is describing it as “punishment”.

Productivity. Another essential piece of the myth is that the rich are uniquely productive. But in fact it’s very difficult to find a John Galt type, who invents something miraculous that otherwise wouldn’t exist for decades. It’s obviously ridiculous to talk about the Walton heirs that way. We could argue about the impact Sam Walton had on the economy (for good and ill alike), but his children add nothing to American productivity.

Some of the rich — the financiers who brought down our economic system and then profited from the government bailout, for example — are just parasites. Getting them out of the picture would make America more productive, not less.

Bill Gates is often seen as the exemplar of the productive rich, but does anybody really think there wouldn’t be personal computers or office-productivity software without him? He out-maneuvered other would-be moguls and captured $66 billion of the wealth created by the computer industry, but did he produce $66 billion of value personally? Don’t be silly.

Similarly, H. L. Hunt didn’t put that oil under Texas; he just found a lot of it. Somebody would have, sooner or later.

So Rand’s image of the rich as Atlas — lonely figures holding up the sky for the rest of us — is just nutty. The vast majority of human wealth comes from some combination of the fecundity of nature, the natural resources of the Earth, the knowledge base handed down from past generations, and the way society is organized — not the heroic individual struggles of the rich.

Capitalism and taxes. The capitalist system works by encouraging people to compete and then rewarding the winners. That’s fine, and history shows that it works better than a Soviet-style command economy. But history also shows that you can levy substantial taxes on those rewards without mucking things up. In the better-dead-than-red 1950s (under that radical Marxist Dwight David Eisenhower) the top tax rate was over 90% (compared to 35% now and 39.6% under Bill Clinton). American capitalism flourished, and the rich, I am told, survived their punishment.

What people like Roger Simon don’t get is that the American acceptance of inequality is really an acceptance of the system that produces it. If that system is working well overall, if it gives ordinary people an acceptable chance to achieve an acceptable life, then OK. If it also grants undeserved good fortune to a handful at the top, so what?

But as wealth continues to concentrate and the benefits of progress go to fewer and fewer people, that acceptance is breaking down. More and more Americans are seeing that for lack of money and lack of opportunity, they can’t take care of their loved ones or give their children a fighting chance at success.

And once you come to that conclusion, those 400-foot yachts look very different.

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An obvious question is: What do you do when someone you know starts throwing around loaded terms like class warfare? In general, I think this stuff works well as mythology and less well the closer you get to reality. So I recommend making your friends and relatives and co-workers say out loud the outrageous stuff that the class-warfare myth just implies. Rather than counter-attack, draw them out. Make them apply the stereotypes to you and to specific people you both know. If they’re not too far gone, they’ll be embarrassed.

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Even if you don’t usually chase the links in Sift articles (many of them are like the endnotes in a book — they’re just here to prove that I’m not making this stuff up), check out this one: The New Yorker’s John Cassidy asks: What good is Wall Street?

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Just as I was putting the finishing touches on last week’s Sift, federal district court Judge Henry Hudson ruled that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

As I’ve described in the past, the ACA isn’t just a menu of unrelated provisions. It all fits together, and you can’t get rid of the unpopular parts without making the popular parts unworkable. In particular, if insurance companies can’t discriminate against pre-existing conditions (the most popular provision in the ACA), then the clever thing to do is to wait until you get sick before you buy insurance. If enough people do that, they undermine the assumptions insurance is based on. The individual mandate (charging uninsured people extra on their income tax) is a way to prevent that.

Just about every state with a Republican attorney general is claiming that the mandate is unconstitutional, hoping that a conservative activist judge will scrap the whole health reform plan. Two of these suits have already been rejected at the district court level, but Virginia’s found Hudson to be a friendly judge. (Maybe that’s because he has a substantial conflict of interest.)

The constitutional basis for the ACA rests on three clauses in Article I, Section 8: the commerce clause (which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce), the elastic clause (which authorizes Congress to do whatever is “necessary and proper” to carry out its other duties), and possibly the taxing clause (“Congress shall have the power to lay and collect Taxes”).

In the past, courts have interpreted these clauses expansively. Even people growing wheat or marijuana for their own use have been found to be participating in interstate commerce, simply because there are interstate markets in wheat and marijuana, and those markets are affected by people who grow for their own use.

One key issue is whether the mandate is a tax on uninsured people or a penalty levied against people for not buying insurance. (That sounds like hair-splitting, but the taxing clause is very open-ended, so if the mandate is a tax, it’s clearly constitutional.) Both sides have been hypocritical about this. During the debate in Congress, Republicans charged that the mandate was a new tax, and Democrats denied it. Now that judges and not voters are the audience, the parties have traded positions.

Hudson ruled that the mandate is a penalty, and that the commerce clause only allows Congress to regulate activity, not inactivity. Failure to buy health insurance is inactivity, so it is beyond Congress’ power to regulate or penalize.

Two other district judges have ruled on similar lawsuits, and both have found the ACA constitutional. Judge George Steeh commented on the “inactivity” argument:

The plaintiffs have not opted out of the health care services market because, as living, breathing beings, who do not oppose medical services on religious grounds, they cannot opt out of this market. As inseparable and integral members of the health care services market, plaintiffs have made a choice regarding the method of payment for the services they expect to receive.

The cases are headed for several different appellate courts, and ultimately to the Supremes, who will rule in about two years.

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The private insurance mandate was originally a conservative idea, launched as an alternative to single-payer health-care proposals. It is currently part of the Massachusetts health-care system signed into law by Mitt Romney.

Kevin Drum notes that a mandate is also part of many conservative proposals to privatize Social Security. In that setting, its constitutionality does not seem to bother anyone.

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Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history. Prediction: In ten years, no one will remember defending it. Does anyone remember defending racial segregation? Did anyone’s ancestors own slaves?

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That ordinary-looking guy at Modell’s trying to sell you the Danny Woodhead Patriots jersey — he might be Danny Woodhead.

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TPMMuckracker looks at Newt Gingrich’s issue-advocacy group “American Solutions for Winning the Future”, and it’s not pretty. ASfWtF pulled in $14.5 million in contributions last year. $9.2 million came through the telephone-fund-raising group InfoCision, which kept $7.9 million for expenses and profit. Another $1.5 million went to a jet-chartering company to fly Newt around in style. So at most 1/3 of the money contributed — and probably a lot less — went towards advocating actual issues.

Where did most of the $5.3 million in non-telemarketing contributions come from? Polluters. Oil, coal, and electric companies, mostly. If there’s a Gingrich administration, I’m sure their investment in “winning the future” will be amply rewarded.

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The death of baseball great Bob Feller gets TPM’s David Kurtz reflecting on how war was different in that generation:

Like many athletes of his era, Feller lost several years of his prime to World War II, when he was a chief petty officer aboard the USS Alabama. Our reporter Eric Lach, a big baseball fan, just remarked to me: “Sometimes I imagine how’d we’d feel about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if LeBron and Derek Jeter were riding Humvees.”

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One more sign that the Republican 2012 primaries will be a circus: John Bolton is thinking about running.

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Republican primary attack ads will have lots of material, because many of the candidates used to concern themselves with reality before pledging themselves to conservative ideology instead. So, for example, Mike Huckabee used to believe in controlling carbon emissions, even though he denies it now. (Governor, we’ve got the tape.)

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Grist’s Tom Philpott examines the food-industry’s point that unregulated agribusiness leads to cheaper food which raises Americans’ quality of life. Well, we do spend a smaller percentage of our income on food, but we also have more a lot more obesity, diabetes, and death from heart attack and stroke than France, Spain, or Germany. So the truth is more nuanced: We have cheap but unhealthy food, with corresponding positive and negative effects on our quality of life.

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Obama to a group of 20 CEOs: “When you do well, America does well.” Has he looked around lately? CEOs are doing great, ordinary Americans not so hot.

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Somebody leaked another Fox News memo instructing its “journalists” to slant the news.

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In case you were planning to give somebody a cat for Christmas, here’s how you wrap one.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.