Stopping Power

Give me three 100 round drum magazines and I could hold my whole block hostage for a day. Give me thirty 10 round magazines and someone will be able to stop me.

– Daniel Hayes, “I Am an AR-15 Owner And I’ve Had Enough“

This week’s featured post is “Our gun problem IS a terrorism problem“.

This week everybody was talking about Orlando

Much of the airtime related to Orlando was a simple outpouring of grief, as might happen whenever a large number of people die — in a medium-sized plane crash, say, or the collapse of an auditorium. The fact that so many of the victims were part of a very specific community — Latino LGBT in Orlando — made the story particularly poignant. If you are part of that community, you might know many of the victims, rather than just one or two. So in that sense it’s like when a plane crashes while carrying a high school French club to Paris, or when most of the Marshall football team was killed.

A second major angle on the story was to examine the killer himself and his motives. This is where the story starts to bifurcate depending on how people of different political views want to frame it. (I believe it shouldn’t bifurcate, as I explain in “Our gun problem IS a terrorism problem“.) You can tell this as a pure Muslim terrorism story: Omar Mateen came from a Muslim family, and his parents are Afghan immigrants. He has been to Saudi Arabia (apparently to do the hajj in Mecca) and the United Arab Emirates. In a 911 call made during the attack, he dedicated his killings to ISIS. (However, ISIS appeared to play no role in the attack, other than in the killer’s mind. The FBI had investigated his trips to the Middle East and found no indication that he received terrorist training.)

You can tell it as a violence-begets-violence story: Mateen was bullied as a youngster, and was a violent man before his attack on the Pulse nightclub. He abused his wives, and sought out a profession — security guard — that allowed him to carry a gun.

You can portray Mateen as a man struggling to deny his sexuality. Pulse was not a random choice. He apparently had attended the nightclub many times, and participated on gay dating web sites. The massacre can be presented as Mateen’s ultimate attempt to declare to the world that he found homosexuality abhorrent rather than tempting. A unique perspective on this interpretation is in two segments (here and here) where Rachel Maddow interviews Sohail Ahmed, a British gay Muslim who once contemplated terrorist acts and now campaigns against violent Islamism.

And finally, the Pulse massacre can be framed as just another mass killing, like Columbine or San Bernadino or Aurora or Sandy Hook. In some sense we don’t care why shooters keep doing these things; we just want it to stop.

If we’re going to profile Muslims, why not profile men?

and guns

Paul Ryan called for a moment of silence in Congress to honor the dead in Orlando, but Democrats decided that Congress’ silence on the mass-shooting issue was part of the problem.

In the Senate, Chris Murphy of Connecticut pulled off something remarkable: He used a filibuster to push an issue forward rather than shut it down. He held the floor for 15 hours until he got an agreement to hold two votes:

One would bar those on a terrorist watch list from purchasing firearms and the other would expand background checks.

It’s important to understand why this worked. An old-fashioned stand-up-and-talk filibuster is limited by individual stamina, so opponents can always wait you out. So as a forcing tactic, it can’t accomplish much by itself. What it does, though, is create drama and draw national attention. If that attention results in national outrage, then the Senate leadership may have to respond.

That’s what happened here. Murphy got a concession because he drew attention to an issue where the public is overwhelmingly on his side. (A PPP poll in Virginia shows an incredible 86%-7% split in favor of keeping people on the no-fly list from buying guns and an even larger majority in favor of universal background checks.) But apparently even that kind of majority will ultimately fail in the face of the NRA: Both measures are expected to lose today when the Senate votes. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine is trying to stitch together a compromise, but even if it passes, the House will probably not vote on it.

An AR-15 owner explains why limiting magazines to ten bullets would make mass killings much harder.

MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends goes back to The Federalist to explain what the Founders meant by “a well-regulated militia”: a citizen army resembling today’s National Guard, which they hoped would avoid (or at least minimize) the need for a professional permanent standing army. The militia is “necessary to the security of a free State” because the Founders feared that a professional army might develop its own interests independent of the People, and so establish tyranny.

Today we have a professional army, anyway. Military matters have become so complex that no part-time soldiers could do it all. So you could argue that makes the Second Amendment null and void, like the parts in the Constitution about slaves and Indians being counted as “three-fifths” of a person in the Census.

But even if you still want to defend the Second Amendment, it should apply only to those who volunteer to join the “select corps” of their National Guard, undergo rigorous training to attain “proficiency in military functions” and perform the “operations of an army,” serve as ordered under the ultimate command of the president and be subject to military discipline.

and Trump

My intuition was telling me that Trump’s reaction to Orlando was disastrous, but my Trump intuition hasn’t been that good, so I was still worried. Fortunately, recent polls seem to bear me out: both the ones that ask specific questions about Orlando and the head-to-head match-ups, where Clinton’s lead keeps growing. (One poll that showed Clinton’s lead shrinking was comparing to a previous poll that I consider an outlier: Reuters has Clinton’s lead down from 14% to a mere 10.3%, which is still above her margin in most other polls.)

Republicans are still talking about getting rid of Trump at the convention, but I’ll believe it when I see it. One thing I’m not hearing so far is some large number of Trump delegates wanting to be free of their commitment to vote for him.

By far the best response to Trump’s banning The Washington Post from his campaign comes from the tiny York Dispatch of York County, PA. In an editorial “Ban us, you big baby“, they ask why they don’t deserve the honor of being banned too.

The Dispatch might be small by comparison, but our commitment to asking tough questions, pointing out inconsistencies, flagging outright lies, simply holding candidates accountable for their words and actions is second to none. … Now, we understand sitting out your campaign events means we might miss a serious, coherent policy speech. Let’s just say, we like our odds. … No, we’re pretty sure we can cover that circus just fine from outside the tent, with the rest of the journalists who refuse to be silenced.

Josh Marshall makes two points about Trump’s recent troubles:

Every candidate is dependent on good poll numbers for morale, fundraising and more. But Trump’s platform isn’t abolishing Obamacare or lowering taxes or kicking more ass in the Middle East. His platform is “winning.” So if he’s clearly not winning, it’s uniquely debilitating.

and

[T]he general election puts a bullshit based candidacy in direct contact with the reality based world. That creates not only turbulence but turbulence that builds on itself because the interaction gets in the spokes of each of these two, fundamentally different idea systems. You’re seeing the most telling signs of that with the growing number of Republicans who, having already endorsed Trump, are now literally refusing to discuss him or simply walking away when his name is mentioned.

Paul Krugman makes a related point: Republicans like Bush and Rubio fell so easily before Trump because (like Soviet leaders before the collapse), they can’t believe what they have to say. A bullshit-based system requires a master bullshitter, which is why the choice came down to Trump or Cruz.


The New Republic attends a Trump rally in North Carolina, where vendors hawk t-shirts saying “Trump That Bitch!” and “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica!”. Things must have gotten worse since I stood in line (unsuccessfully) for a Trump rally in January. The worst I noticed then was “Hillary For Jail”.

AJ+ interviews a woman who was an undercover CIA agent in the Muslim world.

If I learned one lesson from my time with the CIA, it is this: Everybody believes they are the good guy.

Media Matters traces how years of anti-immigrant propaganda on Fox News and right-wing talk radio laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s candidacy.

and Bernie Sanders

Sanders addressed his supporters online Thursday [video, transcript]. He has stopped talking about flipping superdelegates and winning the nomination, but is also not dropping out or endorsing Clinton. Apparently he will go to the convention seeking changes in the primary rules for future elections and in the Democratic platform.

However, when I imagine Clinton strategists watching this speech, I picture them totally confused about what they can offer Bernie, because his demands are not sharpening. Instead, he repeated virtually his entire stump speech. The implied answer to “What do you want?” is “Everything.”

Losing candidates don’t get everything. If they did, elections would be pointless.

If Sanders identifies parts of his agenda that are broadly popular among Democrats — the $15 minimum wage comes to mind — he might win those votes at the convention. But he can’t expect the convention even to debate a broad replacement of Clinton’s positions with his, much less to win such a vote. So where is he going with this?

Pundits are debating about Sanders’ “leverage”, and whether it is shrinking as former supporters like Senator Merkley and Congressman Grijalva defect to Clinton and progressive heroes like Senator Warren get enthusiastic about the Clinton/Trump match-up. Sanders’ intransigence is becoming an Andy Borowitz punch line:

Sanders acknowledged that continuing to fight for the nomination after Clinton is elected President would represent a “steep challenge,” but added, “When we started this race we were only at three per cent in the polls. Anything is possible.”

According to Vox, the Sanders campaign believes their leverage vanishes as soon as they endorse Clinton. But I don’t see it that way: What Clinton really wants from Sanders is an enthusiastic convention speech that tells his supporters they have a place in the Democratic Party and an interest in seeing Clinton beat Trump. They want him campaigning for the Democratic ticket in the fall on college campuses and other places where he is more popular than she is. That leverage stays in place until election day, unless he dissipates it himself, as he might be doing.

I’ve seen a lot of angst about whether the Democratic establishment will learn the right lessons from the surprising success of the Sanders campaign. I wish I saw more angst about whether progressives will learn from Bernie’s failure to win over blacks and Latinos. There’s not going to be any progressive revolution unless people of color believe it’s their revolution. They didn’t this time. What’s going to be different next time?

but you may have missed the good news on net neutrality

Two years ago, in what was widely reported as a defeat for net neutrality, the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out the FCC’s net neutrality rules, but for an interesting reason: It wasn’t that the FCC lacked the power to make such rules, but that the FCC’s power worked differently than the rules implied.

The gist of the court ruling is that the FCC has classified cable companies as information-services providers, but that its net-neutrality rules regulate them like telecommunications carriers. So the FCC’s net-neutrality rules can’t stand. But — and this is the observation that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat — it’s totally within the FCC’s current powers and mandate to just reclassify the cable companies.

It did that, and then re-issued its net neutrality rules. The re-issued rules came back to the same court, which approved them this time. Doubtlessly this will go to the Supreme Court, but so far the good guys are winning.

This is one of many issues that points out the importance of winning the White House: Obama appointed the FCC commissioners whose votes made the difference, and the ultimate decision may hang on which party gets to replace Justice Scalia.

Clinton and Trump have sharp differences here. Trump has tweeted:

Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target the conservative media

while Clinton supported the FCC’s decision.

and you might also be interested in

Yesterday was Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day in 1865 when the abolition of slavery was announced in the last holdout state, Texas. As I’ve discussed before, that was far from the end of slavery, and abolition often only applied within the reach of occupying Union soldiers. But abolition deserves a holiday somewhere in the calendar, and this one is as good as any.

This week at its annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Conference (the U.S.’s largest Protestant denomination) passed a resolution against flying the Confederate flag:

We call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters.

Like many American denominations, the Baptists split over slavery during the years leading up to the Civil War. The Southern Baptists descend from the pro-slavery side of that split, but have moderated considerably since.

The resolution was originally proposed by a black pastor from Texas, and then sharpened by a white former president of the conference, who wrote:

I asked my brothers and sisters to strike the resolution’s language claiming that some people fly this divisive symbol out of a fond memory of their fallen ancestors, rather than hate. … At our denomination’s beginning, we took the wrong stand on the issue of slavery. We cannot undo what our ancestors did, but I felt we had a historic opportunity to show that we have repented of these ungodly attitudes. The SBC has officially and publicly apologized for our racist past, but words without action are cheap and hollow.

I’ve written about the flag before, and here’s where I come down on the fallen-ancestor thing: If you want to put an appropriately-sized Confederate battle flag on the grave of your great-grandfather who died at Vicksburg, I’m fine with it. But flying that flag from a flagpole, where the general public can see it, says something different: that the masters weren’t wrong when they revolted against the United States in order to defend their right to keep black people in slavery.

If that’s the message you want to send, well, it’s a free country. But don’t kid yourself that you’re really saying something else.

Governor Brownback’s huge tax cuts and other conservative policies were supposed to bring jobs to Kansas. Well, in this particular case, they’ve caused jobs to leave Kansas. The CEO of Pathfinder Health Innovations writes:

In the end, I believe the goals of the Brownback administration are going exactly to plan – starve the state of resources to the point where it just makes sense to turn over critical government functions to for-profit entities.

I can’t, in good conscience, continue to give our tax money to a government that actively works against the needs of its citizens; a state that is systematically targeting the citizens in most need, denying them critical care and reducing their cost of life as if they’re simply a tax burden that should be ignored.

It’s because of these moves that I have decided to deny Kansas revenue from Pathfinder’s taxes by moving our company to Missouri.

Paul Ryan is trying to provide a non-Trump policy center for Republicans to coalesce around. His web site at speaker.gov is putting out a series of issue papers under the heading “A Better Way“. Its healthcare proposal is supposed to appear Wednesday, but The Hill reports that once again Republicans will fall short of offering an actual, ready-to-vote-on plan that the CBO can analyze for costs and benefits.

House Republicans’ ObamaCare replacement plan will not include specific dollar figures on some of its core provisions, and will instead be more of a broad outline, according to lobbyists and aides.

Jonathan Chait explains why this is not surprising.

The Republican health-care stance combines rhetorical opposition to all of the cruel features of the old health-care system with denunciations of every practical measure in Obamacare required to fix them. The unspecified alternative allows them to promise that nobody will suffer from lack of access to insurance, but without committing to any sacrifices needed to make this happen.

So, seven years into the debate about ObamaCare, there is still no real alternative other than a return to the system that was bad and still getting worse in 2009.

The prospect of another Clinton administration should have us re-examining the good and bad of the last one. A budget surplus, low unemployment, and low inflation can make the late 90s sound like the Good Old Days, but Nicholas Kristof observes that welfare reform didn’t work out as well as he had hoped at the time.

Welfare reform has failed, but the solution is not a reversion to the old program. Rather, let’s build new programs targeting children in particular and drawing from the growing base of evidence of what works.

That starts with free long-acting birth control for young women who want it (70 percent of pregnancies among young single women are unplanned). Follow that with high-quality early-childhood programs and prekindergarten, drug treatment, parenting coaching and financial literacy training, and a much greater emphasis on jobs programs to usher the poor into the labor force and bring them income.

and let’s close with some intellectual humor

June 20, 2016 – 11:46 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (24)

Our gun problem IS a terrorism problem

ISIS has found the biggest hole in America’s defenses: our lax gun laws.

When Democrats in Congress responded to the Pulse nightclub shooting by renewing calls for gun control, Ted Cruz made a sharp distinction:

This is not a gun control issue; it’s a terrorism issue.

In other words, if it’s one it can’t be the other. Gallup implicitly endorsed that framing by making its respondents choose. The result was the usual partisan polarization: 79% of Republicans described the Pulse attack as “Islamic terrorism”, while 60% of Democrats called it “domestic gun violence”. [1]

But following just half a year after the San Bernardino shooting, the Orlando shooting makes the guns-or-terrorism argument obsolete. It’s all one issue now. ISIS is actively encouraging lone-wolf attacks, and the easy availability of AR-15s and other military-style weapons makes the United States uniquely vulnerable to lone-wolf terrorism. Our political inability to control or track even the most destructive guns keeps that hole in our defenses open.

I’m amazed it took Islamic State strategists so long to figure that out. About a year after 9-11, the Washington metro area was terrorized by someone the press called “the D.C. sniper“. Over a three-week period he shot 13 people apparently at random, ten of whom died. Rather than a mass killing, these were individual attacks that seemed completely unpatterned and unpredictable: one victim was sitting at a bus stop reading a book, another was pumping gas at a self-service station, and a third was walking down a street.

That’s what made the attacks so terrifying: Wherever you were in the D.C. area and whatever you happened to be doing, if you were out in public you had to consider the possibility that you might suddenly be killed.

The press speculated about Al Qaeda, but the killers turned out to have no connection to international terrorism. They were just two guys with a rifle who had drilled a barrel-hole into the trunk of a rusty old car. Their plan was breathtakingly simple: They found obscure spots with clear views of public places and parked there, with the middle-aged sniper hidden in the trunk until a target appeared. After the shots were fired, his 17-year-old accomplice drove them away.

By comparison, 9-11 had been such a complex operation: It was planned in Afghanistan, then communicated to conspirators in Germany, America, and who knows how many other places. The attackers had to gain entry the U.S., where they spent months training in skills like flying a plane. On the designated day, they assembled in airports to play their roles in the plan.

Because 9-11 had so many moving parts and involved so many people, it had many possible points of failure: Communications could be intercepted. Conspirators might raise suspicion while entering the country or during training, then crack under interrogation. They might lose their nerve and defect. They might look suspicious at the airport. The other passengers might fight for control of the plane.

Those failure-points allowed the U.S. government to respond quickly, closing down many of the vulnerabilities that let 9-11 happen. Changes were made in cockpits, in airports, in our screening of people entering the country, and in how we track terrorism suspects. Nobody has succeeded in pulling off a 9-11-style attack since.

But effective as they had been in terrorizing a major urban area, the D.C. sniper duo changed nothing. If Osama bin Laden had realized the significance of that, he and his successors could have kept Americans far more frightened than we have been these last 14 years.

Which is not to say we haven’t been frightened, but more by each other than by foreign terrorists. The years since the D. C. sniper have seen a series of ever-more-horrific mass shootings. Each time, Congress took no action to reduce our vulnerability.

Terrorist plotters may be slow, but eventually they catch on. By now, as Pulse and San Bernadino make clear, ISIS understands very well: One disgruntled, alienated, or insane American (or permanent resident [2]) can easily kill dozens, without breaking any laws until the moment he or she opens fire. A tourist could be equally deadly; the only additional point of legal danger in that plan would be a black-market gun purchase [3], which is made simpler by the fact that we have no system for keeping track of guns, even military-style weapons. [4]

Carrying out such an attack requires little planning or training, so such plans have very few points where they are vulnerable to detection or interruption. Omar Mateen, Rizwan Farook, and Tashfeen Malik did not have to spend weeks at some terrorist camp in Syria or Libya. They didn’t need to smuggle anything into the country or coordinate their plans with some handler from ISIS central command. [5] They just had to buy guns, practice shooting them, and then go kill people.

Best of all (from ISIS’ point of view) the Islamic State didn’t even need to think this up for themselves. All they had to do was observe how defenseless we are against mass shootings (as Sandy Hook made obvious) and how dysfunctional our political system has been in responding to that weakness (as Congress’ complete lack of response to Sandy Hook made obvious). Even after two wildly successful attacks, ISIS doesn’t have to worry all that much about the government shutting down points of vulnerability. With the NRA on the case, no pro-terrorism lobby is needed. [6]

So it may have taken them a while, but the terrorists have adapted. The question is whether we will adapt, overcome the NRA’s resistance, and force our representatives to face the new reality. Will we find ways to reduce the number of the most lethal guns and make the existing ones easier to track? Will we limit guns’ mass-killing potential by banning high-capacity magazines? Will we allow authorities to track suspicious guns-and-ammunition purchasing patterns?

That isn’t just a gun-control agenda any more. It’s an anti-terrorism agenda. Given what we’ve seen, any purported anti-terrorism agenda that does not include such gun-control measures is just not serious.

[1] A third option of “both equally” was offered and drew only 6%. But that choice still paints a picture of two distinct factors that just happen to be present in equal quantities. “Both equally” does not express what I’m claiming here: that mass shootings are our primary terrorism vulnerability.

[2] Guns laws are stricter for non-citizens than for citizens, but permanent residents have all the same second-amendment rights citizens do.

[3] A black-market purchase might not even be necessary, because existing gun laws are so poorly enforced at gun shows, and many laws don’t even apply there. Here, for example, a 13-year-old boy buys a rifle.

[4] The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 forbids the federal government to compile a list or database of gun owners and the guns they own. Paperwork related to background checks on gun buyers is supposed to be thrown away within 24 hours. Jacob Paulsen of usaFirearmTraining.com writes: “Generally speaking for the majority of American gun owners there is no system, database, or registry that ties us to any of our firearms.”

By contrast, we have very tight controls on military weapons like machine guns, bazookas, and hand grenades. Those controls work: Such weapons have not been used in our series of mass killings.

[5] By contrast, the Paris attack was a complex plot involving multiple coordinated actions by experienced operatives, some of whom had fought in Syria. It required ISIS to use resources that authorities could then take off the board. Killing large numbers of Americans is much simpler.

[6] The fact that after Orlando and San Bernardino, the Senate is having so much trouble taking the simplest step — preventing already-identified terrorism suspects from buying more guns — does not bode well. Even if the two parties do manage water something down enough to pass it, the House is unlikely to go along.

June 20, 2016 – 7:56 am Categories: Articles | Comments (16)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Last week I punted a discussion of the Orlando shooting. But the diverse reactions to it continued to dominate the news this week: It was a human tragedy; it was an ISIS attack; it was a hate crime against the LGBT community; it was yet another mass shooting to restart the gun control debate.

What struck me was the insistence that it had to be just one of these things, rather than all of them. Ted Cruz put it most sharply when he declared to the Senate: “This is not a gun control issue; it’s a terrorism issue.” Gallup more-or-less endorsed that idea when it made respondents choose: Democrats saw the Pulse nightclub massacre as a mass shooting, Republicans as a terrorist attack.

What I decided needed saying is that this distinction has become obsolete: Now that ISIS is actively encouraging lone-wolf attacks like Orlando and San Bernardino, gun control is a terrorism issue. The easy availability of military-grade hardware with near-limitless magazines makes us uniquely vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, and the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress keeps that vulnerability in place.

So this week’s featured post is “Our gun problem IS a terrorism problem”. It should be out within the hour.

The weekly summary discusses some of the other ways the Pulse shooting is being interpreted, the surprising fact that the Senate will even vote on some gun-control measures today, the approach of Brexit, Juneteenth, net neutrality, and of course 2016 developments in both parties, before closing with a little intellectual humor.

June 20, 2016 – 7:19 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Unthinkable

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

— George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak“

This week’s featured posts are “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean? Part II” and “About Those Emails“.

The last two days, everyone has been talking about the Orlando shooting

It certainly deserves top billing. Looking at my Facebook news feed, it seems to be what’s on everybody’s mind, and it’s certainly on mine. I wish I had something comforting or hopeful or inspiring to say about it, or even something accusatory that directed blame to more appropriate places than it would otherwise go.

But I don’t. And I don’t want to cheapen the discussion by launching a canned rant about guns or terrorism or some other related issue. Maybe by next week I’ll have something more insightful to say.

One thing I have noticed, though: In previous mass killings, there has been a “We are all …” meme. “We are all Americans“, “Je suis Charlie“, and so on. But one measure of the power of LGBT prejudice is that nothing similar seems to be happening this time. There is no “We are all queer” meme.

I’m reminded of a criticism made by a character in the Richard Condon novel Winter Kills about a fictional president who resembles JFK: “He went to Germany and said ‘I am a Berliner’, but he never went to Mississippi and said ‘I am a nigger’.”

Until then, everybody had been talking about the first woman to clinch a major-party nomination

It was a good week for Hillary Clinton. Monday night AP’s and NBC’s running total of Clinton delegates (both pledged and super) went over the magic number of 2383, clinching the nomination for her. Tuesday she won four of the five primaries (and lost the North Dakota caucus), including getting a surprisingly large margin in California.

With the race decided, the heavyweight endorsements came in: Obama, Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren. Unlike what’s happening the Republican side, all her endorsers seem enthusiastic about getting out and campaigning for her.

Bernie Sanders still hasn’t quite come around yet, but I hope nobody’s pushing him too hard. Clinton would benefit more from a quality endorsement than a prompt one. Better if it takes him a few weeks to endorse Clinton, but it’s clear that he genuinely wants to reconcile his supporters to the Democratic nominee, than if he offers some quick gritted-teeth statement and then stomps off to Vermont until after the election.

The bad news about Clinton looks to be wildly exaggerated: The Clinton Foundation donor who got appointed to a national security board actually did have some reason to be there.

Sanders supporters have been making the point that, since superdelegates could still change their votes, Clinton hasn’t really clinched anything yet.

If you want to get into legalisms, though, no one has ever clinched a nomination before the convention actually voted. Because superdelegates aren’t the only issue: Every convention is a law unto itself, and can change its own rules. So the convention of either party could free its pledged delegates from any previous obligation. In an absolutely literal sense, then, neither Clinton nor Trump has clinched the nomination, and neither had Obama or Romney at this point four years ago.

The Atlantic took this a step further:

If the Sanders camp truly wants to reserve use of the term [presumptive nominee] until every doubt is gone, then it should advocate that people never use it. Even post-convention, a party could put forth a replacement if the nominee dropped out or died.

However, if you cover the 2016 Democratic race the way every race in history has been covered before now — i.e., counting pledged delegates and believing unpledged delegates when they say they are voting for a particular candidate — then Clinton clinched the nomination last Monday and is the presumptive nominee.

Long but interesting Facebook article on Clinton’s long-term popularity/unpopularity.

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

I’ll probably talk about this article more in some future week, but the gist is that there is an underlying, usually unconscious, sexism at work: Patriarchal culture trains us to accept power-seeking in men, but to see power-seeking women as unattractive.

and Trump’s bad week

Before Orlando, outrage over Trump’s repeated anti-Hispanic comments against Judge Curiel had been dominating the news, sometimes overwhelming the history Clinton was making. Many statements from Republican leaders either denounced Trump or distanced themselves from him. I link to several in the featured post “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean? Part II.”

The Clinton campaign’s mock Trump University ad is pretty funny.

A true factoid has been bouncing around Facebook since Obama’s endorsement of Clinton: Only five living people know what it’s like to be president. The three Democrats (Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama) have endorsed Clinton, but the two Republicans (Bush and Bush) have not endorsed Trump.

David Brooks has harsh words for Paul Ryan, who agrees that Trump says racist things, but urges the Republican Party to unite around him anyway.

Ryan’s argument … puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values.

USA Today examined the 3500 lawsuits Trump and his companies have been involved in, and drew this conclusion:

The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.

Republicans who are counting on President Trump to stand by his promises (like choosing Supreme Court nominees from his list) should bear this pattern in mind: Once Trump has gotten what he wants from you, he’ll try to negotiate about whether he should fulfill his side of the deal. He usually wants some additional concession in exchange for delivering what he already owes you.

The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.

The New York Times casts a similar light on Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, all of which are either bankrupt now or owned by somebody else.

But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.

The same could be said about Trump Tower Tampa (where Trump made money while investors lost their deposits on condos that were never built) and several other Trump projects.

Those who invested early in the visions of businessmen like Sam Walton and Bill Gates got rich — sometimes very, very rich. But partnering with Trump has often meant that he winds up with your money.

One of my Facebook friends raised a question about why these stories are coming out now. Didn’t any of the 16 other Republican campaigns have opposition research departments that could feed reporters info about Trump’s shady record?

This illuminates an important difference between the Republican primaries and the general election. Inside the conservative bubble, it’s heresy to point out that some rich people are more deserving than others. They’re all job creators who should get more tax cuts. Attempting to portray any rich man negatively is just “class warfare” or “the politics of envy“.

But the general electorate understands well that, while some people get rich through talent and hard work and visionary ideas, others make money by being scoundrels.

and that rape case

Since there’s a sports angle, a really good summary is in Sports Illustrated. The details bear out the impression you’ve probably already gotten from the headlines: A handsome young athlete (Brock Turner) from an elite university (Stanford) becomes an object of a judge’s empathy, moreso than the woman he sexually assaulted. So Turner gets a 6-month sentence (which could be as little as 3 months if he doesn’t get into any trouble in jail).

Two heroes of the story are Swedish grad students, who happened to be biking past a frat house when they noticed that the female half of the couple apparently having sex by the dumpster was actually unconscious. Rather than decide it wasn’t their business, they asked what was going on, chased Turner down when he ran away, called police, and testified at the trial. I’d like to think young American men would have done the same, but I’m not sure.

At the trial, Turner claimed the woman consented, which seems hard to square with her being unconscious. That points out one of the weird things in the way we discuss rape: When we talk about sex, consent becomes a tricky concept. But in money discussions, consent is totally straightforward.

For example, imagine I ask you for money and you say no. If I then take your wallet, I’m a thief. It doesn’t matter at all whether you’ve given me money in the past, or if you’ve been giving money to lots of other guys. Maybe your jeans are so tight that the wallet in your pocket is totally obvious, leaving nothing to my imagination. Maybe hundred dollar bills are hanging out of your blouse pocket. Maybe we’re both drunk and you pass out before you get done turning me down. None of that matters. If you never said “Here, take my money” I’m a thief.

In discussions of rape, we use phrases like consensual sex. Try to imagine a similar phrase in the money example. It’s redundant to talk about a consensual gift or a consensual loan, because there is no gift or loan without consent; there’s just theft.

and you might also be interested in

Clinton’s charge that Trump is “temperamentally unfit” to be president — which looks like it’s going to be a major theme of her campaign — brings up some fascinating history I hadn’t known.

During the 1964 campaign Fact magazine asked 12,000 psychiatrists, whether Barry Goldwater was “psychologically fit” for the presidency. Most ignored the mailing, but 1189 responded that he wasn’t, and some added colorful comments that made for a sensational article.

It took a few years, but Goldwater won his lawsuit against Fact, and the American Psychiatric Association decided that the profession didn’t need this kind of publicity. So now the official code of ethics contains a “Goldwater Rule”.

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

Samantha Bee explains how it came down to Trump.

and let’s close with the generic TED talk

John Barth once wrote a short story called “Title”, in which every element of the story — including the title — is a placeholder or a generic description. Pat Kelly has now done the same thing for TED talks.

 

June 13, 2016 – 12:02 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

About Those Emails

On the Right, it is an article of faith that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State involves her in crimes that deserve a jail term; either she will be indicted by the FBI or (if not) President Obama somehow is protecting her from indictment. Donald Trump has said “Hillary Clinton has to go to jail.” and “Anything Obama wants, she’s going forward with because you know why? She doesn’t want to go to jail.”

More recently, as it became clear that Clinton would be nominated, some Bernie Sanders supporters began expressing similar hopes: that legal troubles would take Clinton off the board, leaving the nomination for Sanders. Sanders himself has not gone that far, but has urged voters and delegates to “take a hard look” at the report of the State Department Inspector General.

One small place the Clinton/Sanders debate has been playing out is in the comments on this blog, and I have started getting criticism for ignoring or minimizing the issue, particularly the more recent developments. [1] So I thought I’d read the Office of the Inspector General’s report and other well-informed commentary on the Clinton’s emails and report.

What it’s all about. The OIG report says:

Secretary Clinton employed a personal email system to conduct business during her tenure in the United States Senate and her 2008 Presidential campaign. She continued to use personal email throughout her term as Secretary, relying on an account maintained on a private server, predominantly through mobile devices. Throughout Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the server was located in her New York residence.

Instead, she should have used a State Department email account for official business while she was Secretary of State. I don’t think anyone disputes that basic description of the situation. The entire argument is about how serious the issue is.

Separable concerns. The first thing to understand about Clinton’s emails is that there are two separate and more-or-less opposite concerns: security (i.e., keeping information in) and transparency (letting information out).

Most articles about the emails wander from one concern to the other, sometimes irresponsibly. But it makes no sense to jump from an OIG quote about Clinton breaking transparency rules to a charge that she has put the nation’s security at risk. Either, neither, or both might be true, but they are completely different issues.

We won’t know exactly what the FBI is investigating until they tell us, but indications are that they are focused on the security of classified information. If so, then the OIG report is almost a perfect complement: It focuses mainly on transparency; to the extent it discusses security at all, it talks about sensitive-but-unclassified information, which I assume includes things like personnel records.

Transparency. The OIG report is deadly dull to read, because it’s mainly a recent history of record-keeping at the State Department. Clinton is a central figure, but the sweep is much broader.

The report paints a picture of a common bureaucratic problem: The government has good intentions about keeping complete records. Some of those intentions have been written into laws like the Federal Records Act. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has issued government-wide regulations for meeting the legal requirements, and the State Department, like other departments and agencies, has created policies and procedures that (if followed) should fulfill the NARA regulations.

Unfortunately, though, State (like much of the government) never finds the money to create an up-to-date, usable record-keeping system, particularly with regard to modern forms of communication like email. So proper record-keeping is cumbersome, and employees are left with a conflict between following the proper procedures and getting their jobs done.

According to a 2010 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, most agencies do not prioritize records management, as evidenced by lack of staff and budget resources, absence of up-to-date policies and procedures, lack of training, and lack of accountability. In its most recent annual assessment of records management, [the National Archives and Records Administration] identified similar weaknesses across the Federal Government with regard to electronic records in particular. NARA reported that 80 percent of agencies had an elevated risk for the improper management of electronic records, reflecting serious challenges handling vast amounts of email, integrating records management functionality into electronic systems, and adapting to the changing technological and regulatory environments.

You might think that just using the State Department email system would be enough to insure compliance, but no.

Several staff mentioned preserving emails by saving them in their Department email accounts. However, as previously noted, NARA regulations state that agencies may only use an electronic mail system to store the recordkeeping copy of electronic mail messages identified as Federal records if that system contains specific features; the current Department email system does not contain these features.

There’s a separate program for making sure emails get properly recorded, but most people don’t use it.

However, prior OIG reports have repeatedly found that Department employees enter relatively few of their emails into the SMART system and that compliance varies greatly across bureaus, in part because of perceptions by Department employees that SMART is not intuitive, is difficult to use, and has some technical problems.

So working around the system in one way or another has been common.

OIG also reviewed an S/ES-IRM report [don’t worry about the acronym, it looks to be State’s information technology office] prepared in 2010 showing that more than 9,200 emails were sent within one week from S/ES servers to 16 web-based email domains, including gmail.com, hotmail.com, and att.net. S/ES-IRM told OIG that it no longer has access to the tool used to generate this particular report. In another instance, in a June 3, 2011, email message to Secretary Clinton with the subject line “Google email hacking and woeful state of civilian technology,” a former Director of Policy Planning wrote: “State’s technology is so antiquated that NO ONE uses a State-issued laptop and even high officials routinely end up using their home email accounts to be able to get their work done quickly and effectively.”

Previous secretaries of state worked around the system in different ways. Colin Powell used a mixture of personal and official email, while Condoleezza Rice didn’t use email at all. (I’m having trouble imagining how you run a department without email, but somehow she managed it.) Clinton defenders who say that Powell did exactly the same thing as Clinton are exaggerating, but it’s true that no previous secretary had found a way to use email while fully complying with the official procedures.

Nobody worked around the system quite as completely as Secretary Clinton did, and in doing so she undoubtedly violated State Department policies. It’s possible she was in violation of a law against removing government records, though she claims the government still had all her correspondence because the people she was writing to were on government servers. (As we’ve seen, NARA wouldn’t consider that adequate.) She has since sent the government printed copies of her business emails, filtering them out from her personal emails, which were on the same server. (Though critics wonder if she filtered properly.)

But departmental policy is not the same as law, so it’s still iffy whether there’s a technical legal violation related to the FRA. Even if there is, prosecuting for it would be unheard of. The OIG report gives the example of an ambassador to Kenya:

the Ambassador continued to use unauthorized systems to conduct official business [after being told not to]. The Department subsequently initiated disciplinary proceedings against him for his failure to follow these directions and for several other infractions, but he resigned before any disciplinary measures were imposed.

That response — no legal charges, but internal discipline that vanishes when someone leaves State — seems to be how these things are typically handled.

Security. Another point that doesn’t get enough attention in the media is that the State Department’s email system does not have sufficient security to allow classified discussions. Classified discussions require use of a different messaging system, which can only be accessed from secure locations. (I’m wondering whether this system is the one whose messages Chelsea Manning released to the world, but I haven’t verified that.)

So, completely independent of whether Clinton’s email files were stored on her personal server or the State Department’s, those files are not supposed to contain classified information. If they do, there’s been a security violation before the email gets to the server.

In other words, if you’re worried about documents stamped TOP SECRET getting attached to emails and winding up on a hard drive in Clinton’s basement, stop. That’s not how State is supposed to operate or did operate.

The potential security violations we’re hearing about are almost all of the incidental or accidental variety: Somebody (usually not Clinton, but the person writing to her) should have known that certain information ought to be classified, but mentioned it in email anyway. [2] Or an email contained information that the State Department considered unclassified at the time, but was later classified by some other agency.

Politics and sources. Before going into detail about specific alleged violations, another thing to understand is that all our windows into the FBI investigation are distorted by politics. The FBI has not issued any official reports on Clinton’s emails and is not briefing the press directly. But it sometimes briefs members of Congress about what it has been finding, and that information sometimes gets leaked to the press.

So most of the news articles about the FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails are based on leaks from Republican congressmen, who may slant their assessments or cherry-pick their quotes because they want to make Clinton look bad. Whenever a story mentions “congressional sources”, that generally means “Republicans”.

As a result, there has been a string of sensational “scoops” that subsequently had to be walked back as more accurate versions came out. (One report that 147 FBI agents were involved in the investigation — making it a Public Enemy #1 scale effort — eventually got reduced to less than 12.) As always, the sensational version sticks in the public mind even after it has been debunked. This is particularly true within the conservative echo chamber.

Recent revelations. This week the The Wall Street Journal published an article (sourced to anonymous “congressional and law-enforcement officials”) describing top-secret information allegedly found on Clinton’s server. These were email exchanges between lower-level State Department officials that got forwarded to Clinton. (I found no claim that Clinton participated in the exchanges.)

The circumstances are worth understanding: The U.S. regularly launches drone strikes in Pakistan without the official consent of the Pakistani government. This fact itself is considered top secret (even though everyone knows it), and plans for specific drone strikes are top secret, for obvious reasons. (If news about the strike got out beforehand, whoever we were trying to attack could get away.)

As you can imagine, the drone program is not popular inside Pakistan. Protests from Pakistani officials got more and more intense, and the State Department was the official channel for receiving these protests. So eventually, officials at State were given prior warning of drone strikes.

The CIA initially chafed at the idea of giving the State Department more of a voice in the process. Under a compromise reached around the year 2011, CIA officers would notify their embassy counterparts in Islamabad when a strike in Pakistan was planned, so then-U.S. ambassador Cameron Munter or another senior diplomat could decide whether to “concur” or “non-concur.” Mr. Munter declined to comment.

Diplomats in Islamabad would communicate the decision to their superiors in Washington. A main purpose was to give then-Secretary of State Clinton and her top aides a chance to consider whether she wanted to weigh in with the CIA director about a planned strike.

Drone strikes are time-sensitive events, because the terrorist leaders they target move around a lot. So if State was going to object, it had to do so quickly. And now we once again run into the limitations of State Department systems.

The time available to the State Department to weigh in on a planned strike varied widely, from several days to as little as 20 or 30 minutes. “If a strike was imminent, it was futile to use the high side, which no one would see for seven hours,” said one official. [3]

Adding to those communications hurdles, U.S. intelligence officials privately objected to the State Department even using its high-side system. They wanted diplomats to use a still-more-secure system called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Community Systems, or JWICs. State Department officials don’t have ready access to that system, even in Washington. If drone-strike decisions were needed quickly, it wouldn’t be an option, officials said.

So once again, we see people facing a choice between following proper procedures and getting their jobs done. On at least a few occasions, then, discussions about drone strikes happened over insecure email channels.

One such exchange came just before Christmas in 2011, when the U.S. ambassador sent a short, cryptic note to his boss indicating a drone strike was planned. That sparked a back-and-forth among Mrs. Clinton’s senior advisers over the next few days, in which it was clear they were having the discussions in part because people were away from their offices for the holiday and didn’t have access to a classified computer, officials said.

I interpret “cryptic” to mean that the officials tried to be oblique in their references, so that anyone who might intercept the email wouldn’t immediately know what they were talking about. (I picture something like Tony Soprano’s phone conversations, or the ones KGB agents have on The Americans.) This is not considered an acceptable technique for securing classified information, but it seems to have worked.

U.S. officials said there is no evidence Pakistani intelligence officials intercepted any of the low-side State Department emails or used them to protect militants.

The WSJ article also notes that this kind of corner-cutting happens from time to time all over the government.

Several law-enforcement officials said they don’t expect any criminal charges to be filed as a result of the investigation, although a final review of the evidence will be made only after an expected FBI interview with Mrs. Clinton this summer.

One reason is that government workers at several agencies, including the departments of Defense, Justice and State, have occasionally resorted to the low-side system to give each other notice about sensitive but fast-moving events, according to one law-enforcement official.

So: Rules were broken, but not with malicious intent, and apparently without bad consequences. The most serious violations were not by Clinton, but the record of that rule-breaking is on her server and shouldn’t be. If the WSJ article is accurate, prosecuting anyone for these incidents would be highly unusual, and Clinton would not be at the top of the list.

[1] Here’s where I’m coming from: I voted for Sanders in the New Hampshire primary and have been raising many of his signature issues — inequality, campaign finance, etc. — for several years. But I have criticized the anti-Clinton turn in Sanders’ rhetoric. And I have been increasingly disenchanted with his campaign’s tendency to turn the ordinary politics of a presidential contest into a persecution narrative, one that unifies the media, the Democratic Party, election officials, and everybody else who isn’t 100% for Bernie into a sinister Clinton-supporting “Them”.

[2] If you’ve ever worked someplace that handles classified information (I used to and my wife still does), you know that such technical violations of security are not that unusual, because the boundary between what can and can’t be said in certain places to certain people can be hazy. (I’ve heard many face-to-face conversations end with: “But we probably shouldn’t be talking about this.”) Also, while any idiot should know not to mention the names of spies or technical details of weapons systems, a lot of stuff gets classified that really isn’t that important. That kind of information sometimes slides into conversations without anybody noticing.

[3] The article does not speculate about this, but I wonder if the CIA ever gamed the system: By picking particularly inconvenient moments to notify State and leaving very small time windows, they might make it harder for State to interfere with their plans.

June 13, 2016 – 10:28 am Categories: Articles | Comments (30)

Tagged |

What Should “Racism” Mean? Part II.

Republican leaders are disturbed by Trump’s racist comments. But two-thirds of Republican voters don’t think they’re racist at all.

In a week that saw Hillary Clinton became the first woman ever to clinch a major-party nomination, probably more news-network air time got devoted to the effort of Republican leaders to distance themselves from Donald Trump. In the wake of his long series of attacks against the “Mexican” judge overseeing one of the Trump University fraud lawsuits, the word racist came up a lot, and few elected Republicans seemed willing to defend Trump from the charge that it applied to him.

Speaker Paul Ryan described a Trump statement as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Republican Senator Mark Kirk withdrew his endorsement of Trump, saying that in view of his recent statements “I cannot and will not support my party’s nominee for president”. Maine’s Senator Susan Collins refused to rule out voting for Clinton. Former senatorial candidate (and major Republican donor) Meg Whitman compared Trump to Hitler and Mussolini. And on and on. The most blistering attack of all came from the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney:

I don’t want to see trickle-down racism. I don’t want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that are following. Presidents have an impact on the nature of our nation, and trickle-down racism, trickle-down bigotry, trickle-down misogyny, all these things are extraordinarily dangerous to the heart and character of America. [1]

But if the primaries proved anything, it’s that the GOP’s leadership is out of tune with its voters, especially compared to Trump. So when YouGov asked whether Trump’s comments were racist, only 22% of Republicans were reading from Paul Ryan’s textbook, while almost 2/3rds said the comments weren’t racist. By a narrower 43%-39% margin, Republicans said that Trump was right to make those comments. [2]

What could they possibly be thinking?

Trump’s own explanation was far from convincing. In a prepared statement, he argued that his comments had been “misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage” when actually they were just targeted at Judge Curiel, who apparently had it coming because he didn’t dismiss the Trump U lawsuit.

To me, that’s like yelling “Nigger!” at a black driver who cuts you off in traffic, and then feeling misunderstood when the blacks in your carpool take offense. You didn’t launch a categorical attack on all blacks, you just used a racial insult against one guy who had it coming because he was in your way. Why can’t they see the difference?

I got a better clue from listening to Bill O’Reilly. Wednesday night, Bill challenged Congressman Bill Flores about the Texas Republican’s use of racist.

Do you believe that Donald Trump gets up in the morning and says, “You know what? I don’t like Mexicans, I’m going to go out and try to make them look bad.”? Do you believe that? … Don’t you think it was more about Trump being angry with the judge’s decision in a civil litigation rather than the judge’s ethnicity? … OK, I get your point, but I think you understand mine as well. That you don’t use the R-word unless you are [talking about] David Duke, unless you have got a history of trying to denigrate minorities or other people.

Trump isn’t ex-KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, so he’s not a racist. Even labeling specific quotes as racist (which is all Paul Ryan did; he didn’t call Trump a racist) is apparent going too far. The most O’Reilly would say was that they were “unwise”.

And now we’re back on a topic I covered two years ago in “What Should Racism Mean?“. At that time I reviewed a long list of pseudo-scandals that President Obama had started … by doing things that previous presidents had done without upsetting anybody: put his feet on a White House desk, let a Marine hold his umbrella, send secular Christmas cards, and so on. Similarly, the luxurious White House lifestyle — unchanged from previous administrations — suddenly began inspiring outrage when a black family moved in.

So I raised the question: Is that racist? And I allowed for the possibility that some might not want to call it that.

I sympathize with people who want to reserve racism for Adolf Hitler ordering the Final Solution to the Jewish problem or George Wallace standing in the door to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. The men who lynched Emmett Till or the grand jury that refused to indict them — those people were racists. I get that it doesn’t seem right to put them in the same category with the people who only just realized in 2009 that life in the White House is pretty sweet.

But a problem comes up: If you want to construe racist and racism very narrowly, then what words do you use for people who (for some reason other than conscious willful hatred) just can’t look at a black president or his family the same way they have always looked at white presidents and their families? It’s a thing; it really happens, and it has important political consequences. What do you call it?

The Trump/Curiel situation is similar. Trump is doing something morally objectionable here. He is taking advantage of his fans’ willingness to believe bad things about Mexican-Americans on flimsy or no evidence (just as, when he was pushing Birtherism, he was taking advantage of their willingness to believe bad things about a black president on flimsy or no evidence), in order to either put pressure on a federal judge or explain away why so many people are suing him for fraud.

In other words, once again he is looking at the public’s racial prejudices and saying, “I can make this work for me.” That doesn’t make him Hitler or David Duke, but it’s a despicable act that needs a name. What is it? O’Reilly’s suggestion of unwise doesn’t fill the bill, because there’s no moral component to unwise. Spending $35,000 on a Trump University course is unwise; Trump’s repeated and calculated abuse of Judge Curiel is something altogether different.

And if you are inside the conservative bubble, that “something” has no name. The word that the rest of the country uses — racism — has been declared off-limits and not replaced. And now that there is no way to talk about Trump’s offense, it doesn’t exist. Whatever is wrong with Trump’s statements can no longer be put into words, so they aren’t wrong — at least not to a plurality of Republicans.

George Orwell had this all figured out in the mid-20th century. As he wrote in “The Principles of Newspeak“:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. [my italics]

In today’s Newspeak, as spoken by devotees of AmCon, racism has been stripped of all meanings beyond getting up in the morning and saying “I don’t like Mexicans, I’m going to go out and try to make them look bad.” It applies to active white supremacists like David Duke, and no one else.

But if treating a black First Family differently from all white First Families isn’t racism, what is it? If citing a judge’s ethnicity as evidence of his unfitness isn’t racism, what is it?

Unless they’re trying to restrict the language to make these issues “literally unthinkable”, American conservatives owe us some new terminology.

[1] To flesh out what Romney might mean by “trickle-down racism”, look at this report from the Southern Poverty Law Center about how the bigotry in our presidential campaign is showing up in our schools and on our playgrounds.

[2] Among all voters, a 57%-20% majority said Trump was wrong, and a 51%-32% majority said the comments were racist. For some reason YouGov’s headline characterizes that majority as “thin”, but it really isn’t.

June 13, 2016 – 8:05 am Categories: Articles | Comments (26)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I wish I had something important and meaningful and comforting to say about the Orlando shooting. It would be a fine thing to write some words that inspire hope and courage, and if I had those words I would gladly give them to you.

However, the kind of thing I think I do well is slow rumination, not instant response to events whose details are still coming out. I am still digesting the horror in Orlando. I don’t want to use it as an excuse to reprise a canned rant about guns or terrorism or bigotry, so today I will not say much at all about it. That’s not because I want to trivialize or ignore it.

So today’s articles will be the ones I have been working on all week. The first to come out — probably within an hour — will be “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean? Part II.” This week you probably heard more than you wanted about Donald Trump’s diatribes against the “Mexican” judge, and the responses of leading Republican like Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney. But I was struck by a detail that didn’t get that much attention: a poll saying that 2/3rds of Republicans disagree with Ryan and Romney; they say Trump’s comments were not racist.

That took me back to the theme of my “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” article from 2014. It’s not unreasonable to want to restrict usage of the word racism to extreme cases like the Nazis or the KKK. But if you do that, how do you describe things like Trump’s comments about Judge Curiel? To me, it seems like the Right has taken a lesson from George Orwell: If you restrict words to narrow meanings and don’t provide new terminology to fill the gaps, you can restrict discussion, and ultimately restrict thought. Those poll results, I believe, stem from that restricted thinking.

The second featured article was inspired by a critical comment on last week’s Sift: that I am ignoring or trivializing the Clinton email issue, particularly the new information that has come out in the last few weeks. So I read the State Department Inspector General’s report and The Wall Street Journal‘s latest leak of information about the alleged top secret information on Clinton’s server. My summary will be in “About Those Emails”, which will be out later this morning.

The weekly summary will briefly link to accounts of the Orlando shooting, before going on to political news in each party, the Stanford rape case, Samantha Bee’s summary of the presidential primaries, and a few other things, before closing with a speaker who has reduced TED talks to their generic essence. That should come out around noon.

June 13, 2016 – 7:34 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Float and Sting

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
The hands can’t hit what the eyes can’t see.

— Muhammad Ali

This week’s featured post is “Preserving the Cult of the Job Creator“.

This week everybody was talking about Muhammad Ali

who died Friday at age 74.

Boxing has declined in the last few decades, to the point that it’s now on the fringes of most sports fans’ attention. I had to look up who the heavyweight champion of the world is now, and didn’t recognize any of the names I saw.

If you grew up in this era of decline, you may not have any notion of what the heavyweight boxing title used to mean. I can’t think of anything to compare it to today. It had a mythic quality; the Champ wasn’t just a star athlete, he was the current avatar of some essential aspect of manliness. In recent years, probably no athlete has stood as high as Michael Jordan did in the 1990s, but even he was just a man playing a game. Half a century ago, the Champion of the World was more than that.

So it mattered who the Champ was, even if you didn’t care about boxing as a sport. That a black man like Joe Louis could be Champ in the 1930s and 40s (not just beating all comers, but representing America against foreigners like Nazi Germany’s Max Schmeling) didn’t just inspire his fellow blacks, but influenced many whites’ thinking about race, and probably played a role in the acceptability of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.

In pure sporting terms, Muhammad Ali was a figure on the scale of Tiger Woods or LeBron James. He changed his sport with a style that was light and graceful. Previous champions had been powerful punchers. But Ali’s quickness made opponents miss by embarrassing margins, letting him strike back while they were off balance.

And then there was his beyond-sports significance. Joe Louis had epitomized the soft-spoken black man who knew not to overstep. Satchel Paige played the minstrel and clown, hoping to avoid white hatred by keeping things light. Jackie Robinson understood that his play on the field could be his only response to racist abuse. But Ali got in America’s face. “I am the greatest!” he announced bluntly. He set the stage for the black-power turn in the civil rights movement. Why did a successful black have to be humble and take care not to offend? Why couldn’t he be as brash as any white man?

And why did he have to be Christian? Already celebrated as Cassius Clay, he rejected that as a “slave name” when he converted to Islam. By insisting that the public use his Muslim name, Ali blazed a path later followed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and many other sports stars.

At the height of his career, Ali refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War, catalyzing a national debate about whether black men should fight yellow men to maintain white men’s power. (“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” he said.) After being refused conscientious-objector status, he was convicted of draft evasion (later overturned by the Supreme Court on a technicality) and banned from boxing for more than three years.

Then he returned to take the championship back from Joe Frazier. The three Ali/Frazier bouts were Super-Bowl-level events; for a few days all other sporting news faded to insignificance.

So if Ali’s heyday happened before your time, this is what I would like you to understand: He filled a role in society that does not exist any more. There is literally no one like him.

and (yet again this week) Donald Trump

Whatever else you may think of Trump, he is a genius at drawing media attention. Hillary Clinton got a lot of buzz for her foreign-policy speech Thursday, but only because she was talking about Trump. Afterwards, conservatives criticized Clinton’s speech because it unveiled no new foreign-policy ideas … as if anyone would have covered an actual Clinton-doctrine speech that wasn’t about Trump.

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

The Trump University fraud suits got major coverage this week. The basic story is the same one I summarized in March. What was new was how Trump doubled down on vilifying the judge in the San Diego suit, claiming that he must be biased against Trump because he is “Mexican” (actually an American born in Indiana to legal Mexican-immigrant parents). He also suggested that a Muslim judge might be also be biased against him.

Try to imagine any comparable situation. Picture, say, President Nixon denouncing Judge Sirica for being Italian, or Ted Cruz blaming the same-sex marriage decision on Justices Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg being Jewish.

The Atlantic notes an appellate court’s comment on a case in the 90s where similar objections were made:

“Courts have repeatedly held that matters such as race or ethnicity are improper bases for challenging a judge’s impartiality,” wrote the chief judge, Ralph Winter, a Reagan appointee. “Nor should one charge that a judge is not impartial solely because an attorney is embroiled in a controversy with the administration that appointed the judge. … Finally, appointment by a particular administration and membership in a particular racial or ethnic group are in combination not grounds for questioning a judge’s impartiality. Zero plus zero is zero.”

Vox makes this observation:

For a man who’s quick to claim that “the Hispanics” love him, Trump certainly seems quick to assume that actual Hispanics do not.

Trump’s other defense was to release a video in which Trump U customers praised the seminars they attended. AP discovered that these were not “typical” Trump U customers at all, but were “beholden to Trump” in some other way. For example, one owed Trump a favor for providing a blurb for her son’s self-help book. Another is a businessman who sells products through Trump’s golf courses, restaurants, and resorts.

As for why there are lawsuits in only two states, Vox reports: “State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations.” A former Texas official told The Dallas Morning News:

The decision not to sue him was political. Had [Trump] not been involved in politics to the extent he was at the time, we would have gotten approval. Had he been just some other scam artist, we would have sued him.

Tuesday, Trump lit into the press for doing its job too well.

Recapping the story from the beginning: Back in August, Fox News hosted a Republican debate. Megyn Kelly’s questions to Trump were tougher than he liked, so he tried to intimidate Fox into removing her five months later when Fox News held the last debate before the Iowa caucuses in January. Fox refused, so Trump boycotted the debate and staged a rival event, which he promoted heavily and billed as a fund-raiser for veterans groups. He claimed to raise $6 million, of which he supposedly donated $1 million himself.

In any other campaign, reporters would routinely ask the campaign office for proof that the money had been distributed, some staffer would assemble the paperwork and put out a press release, and that would be the end of it, probably without you ever hearing about the follow-up. But the Trump campaign didn’t do its part, so The Washington Post started contacting veterans groups to see if they’d gotten the promised money.

The Post’s David Fahrentholt first wrote about it in March, when he could only account for half the money. He came back to the topic on May 21, and got Trump’s campaign manager to admit that they only collected $4.5 million. He wouldn’t say whether Trump’s million was part of that or not.

Then on May 24, the checks suddenly went out.

Summing up: When Trump made a claim that garnered him good publicity, at least one hard-working reporter checked to see if it was actually true. It turned out to be only half-true, and the reporter’s scrutiny shamed Trump into making good on his promises. That’s good journalism. Any veterans group that got a check dated May 24 should send David Fahrenthold a thank-you note.

But Trump went into a tirade against the press corps as a whole, calling an ABC reporter “a sleaze”.

The unprecedented scale of Donald Trump’s disconnection from the truth has swamped ordinary notions of fact-checking. (PolitiFact has identified 29 Trump pants-on-fire lies, compared to 3 from Clinton and none from Sanders.) How the media should adjust has become a topic of discussion. Here, CNN tried out something new: fact-checking him in real time.

A number of American writers, some as famous as Stephen King and Amy Tan, published “An Open Letter to the American People” speaking out against Donald Trump. Unfortunately, it included this line:

Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another

which Daniel José Older described as

not only empirically false, it’s a continuation of the ongoing legacy of sanitized lies America has shoved down its own throat since its creation

I guess I’d say that from the beginning, the two impulses have struggled for dominance. In every generation, America was bringing people of diverse backgrounds together in new ways, and also pitting people against each other. (“All men are created equal,” the slave-owner wrote earnestly.) Over time, I think the bringing-people-together impulse has been slowly winning out, as movements for abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights, gender rights, gay rights, (and so on) attest. But I think it’s a mistake to minimize either the authenticity of the idealism that has animated Americans through the centuries or its consistent failure to fully manifest in a fair society.

And yes, electing Trump would be a lurch back towards nativism and bigotry.

and the Democrats

Tomorrow is the last big round of primaries, with only D.C.’s primary next week still left. California is the big one and may be close, but probably it will also be anticlimactic. New Jersey is in the Eastern time zone and Clinton should win it easily. That should give her more than enough delegates have the nomination already clinched before California is called.

Then Wednesday, we get to the moment everyone has been speculating about: What will Bernie do? At this point I think I’ll just wait and see.

Hard to say what’s going on with the general-election polls. Some show a close race between Trump and Clinton, while others don’t.

and the gorilla that got killed

Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati  Zoo, was killed the Saturday before Memorial Day after a 3-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure and seemed to be in danger.

This set off a storm of social media commentary because it wasn’t Harambe’s fault, maybe the boy could have been saved without killing the gorilla (though I wouldn’t want to be the guy who made that decision if the boy then died), and so on.

One major target was the boy’s mother, for not keeping better track of him. She has four children (who I assume were all at the zoo with her, though I haven’t seen anybody verify that explicitly). The fact that the family is black raised the old stereotype of irresponsible black women who have more children than they can manage. And it came out that the children’s father had served a year in jail on a drug charge, as if that had some relevance.

It’s a shame there isn’t more sympathy for a mother who clearly must have believed her child was about to die right in front of her.

My wife and I are that couple you know who likes kids but have none of their own, so we’ve had lots of conversations with parents who were letting their hair down. I think every parent I’ve known can tell a story about a moment when their kid was suddenly gone, and then just as suddenly reappeared someplace he or she couldn’t possibly be. Kids are ingenious little buggers who can spot momentary distractions and take advantage by moving really, really fast.

Here’s my negligent-adult story: I was out in the yard with a friend’s daughter. At one point she was standing securely on my shoulders, perfectly balanced between my raised arms, which she could grab if she got unsteady. But then she jumped off at a moment and in a direction that I completely did not expect. My dive to catch her was too slow, and we stayed in eye contact all the way to the ground, which seemed like a very long time. Landing on her back scared her and knocked the wind out of her, but she was otherwise unharmed.

All the stories I know personally are like that: The shield of adult protection momentarily fails, and something really bad could happen, but it doesn’t. Cars stop inches short, human or animal predators don’t happen to appear during the defenseless instant, the ER people get the stomach pumped out in time, and so on. That’s what happens almost every time adult vigilance fails. Some people get unlucky, but the rest of us (if we’re honest) have to admit this truth: If perfection were the standard, then nobody would deserve to have healthy children.

So the reactions I empathized with were like Amanda Marcotte’s:

The expectation that you spend the next 18 years of your life never being less than perfect for a moment is one reason I don’t want kids.

And Kimberley Harrington’s:

If you want to know why mothers — especially mothers in this country — are so batshit crazy, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are blamed for every. god damn. thing. BY STRANGERS. Work full time? Why are you letting someone else raise your kid? Stay at home mom? Why aren’t you teaching them to be independent go-getters? Breastfeeding, formula feeding, fucking wilderness schools, grit, financial savvy, watching them all of the time, watching them none of the time, free range, Tiger Mom-ing ALL OF THE THINGS OH MY GOD INTERNET MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MINDS.

but I need to fix a mistake

Last week I got taken in by some of the bad reporting on a case of an antibiotic-resistant infection. A commenter linked to a more accurate article from Ars Technica.

While, again, this isn’t exactly good news, it’s not catastrophic. There are several last-resort antibiotics, and doctors can try different combinations and strengths of prescriptions before an infection may be deemed untreatable.

The somewhat more detailed summary goes like this:

Thursday’s report of a mcr-1-based colistin-resistant bacterial infection in a US patient is concerning, but unsurprising. The plasmid based resistant gene threatens to spread to other bacteria, potentially to ones that are already resistant to last resort drugs, such as CRE. However, the trajectory of mcr-1‘s emergence and its contribution to drug resistant infection trends is not yet clear. For now, the case serves mostly to highlight the ongoing crisis of rising antibiotic resistance and furthers the need for better stewardship of old antibiotics and development of new ones.

My mistake in falling for — and worse, promoting — the more apocalyptic version of the story (that the bacteria was resistant to all antibiotics) demonstrates a type of error I think everybody needs to watch out for: I’ve been watching the erosion of antibiotic effectiveness for years now and trying to call my readers’ attention to it. So when reputable news outlets seemed to be saying that the disaster I’d been warning about was finally here, I didn’t check the details the way I should have.

and you might also be interested in

In case you missed it, here’s the town hall meeting President Obama had Wednesday in Elkhart, Indiana.

And he answered more questions afterward, like this one about gun control.

I guess it’s not that surprising to hear that there’s a 50th-anniversary Monkees album. But the fact that it’s getting good reviews is a shock.

and let’s close with something hopeful

José Picardo is a high school assistant principal who thinks the kids might be all right. In an article published on Medium, he recalled this photo that went viral on the internet last year, apparently showing teen-agers at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam staring into their phones while ignoring Rembrandt’s masterpiece “The Night Watch” on the wall behind them.

Lots of folks took the photo as “a perfect metaphor for our age”, in which young people are so addicted to technology that the beauty of the real world escapes them.

But what were they doing? Texting? Playing Angry Birds? Checking how many Likes their selfies were getting?

Not exactly.

It turns out that the Rijksmuseum has an app that, among other things, contains guided tours and further information about the works on display. As part of their visit to the museum, the children, who minutes earlier had admired the art and listened attentively to explanations by expert adults, had been instructed to complete an assignment by their school teachers, using, among other things, the museum’s excellent smartphone app.

June 6, 2016 – 10:38 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (17)

Preserving the Cult of the Job Creator

Members of the donor class must accept Trump’s personality cult to maintain their own.

Amazingly, on Wednesday somebody wrote an entire article about the presidential race that said hardly anything about Donald Trump. Even more remarkably, the article was an endorsement of Trump.

It’s true: Home Depot co-founder (and billionaire Jeb Bush donor) Bernie Marcus managed to endorse Trump without mentioning any particular thing he imagines President Trump will do, other than Make America Great Again and take the country in some unspecified “new direction”. No Mexican wall, no Muslim ban or database, no trade war with China, no deportation force rounding up 11 million people, no renegotiating the public debt, no ordering our military to commit war crimes, no nukes for Saudi Arabia. None of the positions Trump has made famous garner a single line.

OK then, maybe Marcus just dislikes Hillary Clinton. But why? That also is a little hard to get a handle on, because his denunciations of Clinton (or maybe President Obama; they’re interchangeable) are vague to the point of vanishing into rhetoric. Clinton will “push the [Supreme] court leftward for generations”, but no specific legal issue explains why Marcus believes that would be bad. Like Obama, Clinton is “hostile to free enterprise” in some unspecified way. Together, Clinton and Obama “have peddled a dangerous sentiment that government can provide for Americans better than the private sector.”

I’d be really interested to find a quote in which either Clinton or Obama actually expressed that sentiment, much less “peddled” it. (As No Democrat Ever said: “Damn this free enterprise system! Why can’t the government just own everything?”) I’ve listened to a lot of speeches from both of them, and I’ve never heard it. [1]

When otherwise intelligent people justify their actions and beliefs with vague claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny, I start to wonder what’s happening under the surface. Something about Clinton, Obama, and Democrats in general pisses Bernie Marcus off. What could it be?

Our main clue is the third major topic in Marcus’ article, one that he discusses at greater length and with more feeling than either Trump or Clinton: Home Depot, and (by inference) himself. In particular: all the wonderful opportunities that it/he has magnanimously provided for others. For example:

One young man started with us at 17 years of age, bringing carts in from the parking lot. Ultimately, he became a regional president. Imagine Americans vilifying this young man, who became a millionaire and earned every penny of it.

Indeed: imagine. You have to imagine, because in reality no one is vilifying Americans for getting ahead by working hard. If anyone were doing that, Marcus could quote them. But no one is, so he has to imagine.

He imagines a lot of other things too. What if the oppressive regulations of “Obama/Clinton-style government” had existed back in the 1970s when his wondrous Home Depot was getting started? Well, a (briefly) small business like his just couldn’t have happened under those conditions, because under Dodd-Frank, bankers would have required a solid balance sheet rather than basing their loan decisions on his “character and determination”. [2]

And Home Depot couldn’t have gone public under Sarbanes-Oxley because … I’m not sure why. IPOs continue to happen. Facebook went public. UnderArmour. Chipotle. But Home Depot wouldn’t have been able to figure it out for some reason.

And that would have been horrible for America because

the risks we took in the 1970s have resulted in millions of jobs – not just at The Home Depot, but at our suppliers, our vendors, and even our customers’ businesses.

This is where I think we start getting to the root of things, because by this point Marcus has left reality completely behind and vanished into self-glorifying mythology.

You see, Marcus may think of himself as a champion of small business and a job creator, but the reality is the exact opposite. Other than WalMart and maybe Amazon [3], I can’t think of any corporation that has destroyed more small businesses than Home Depot.

Whatever Marcus may imagine, Home Depot didn’t create the home-improvement retail market, it captured that market from other businesses that were already serving it.

Not so long ago, hardware stores and electrical supply shops and paint stores and lumber yards were just about all locally owned by businesspeople you could meet and talk to. If you were a tool-loving kind of guy [4] and could scrape some money together, you could start such a business and be your own boss. Now that’s a much dicier proposition — not because of Dodd-Frank or Sarbanes-Oxley or even ObamaCare, but mainly because of Home Depot (and its rival Lowes).

I haven’t done enough research to back this up with numbers, but looking at the merchandise and staff of my local Home Depot, I strongly suspect that (all together) those locally-owned stores of the 1970s employed more people, and probably stocked more American-made products. [5] Looking at the full picture, I’d guess that Home Depot isn’t a job creator at all, especially if we’re talking about American jobs. It’s more of a job destroyer.

So while you can argue that Home Depot captured its markets fair and square (because it provides a larger selection of products at a better price, or for some other reason), you can’t give it credit for millions of jobs, or any jobs at all.

Understanding the job-creator mythology and how divorced it is from reality puts us in a position to explain why Marcus (and so much of the donor class that supported Romney and Bush) has to come around to Trump eventually, even if all his policies and positions are too embarrassing to mention: Republicans have incorporated job-creator mythology into their larger myth of America, while Democrats have not. The reason Marcus and his compatriots think Democrats like Clinton or Obama (or me) are so hostile to “free enterprise” is that we don’t worship them the way they think they deserve to be worshiped.

Democrats readily acknowledge that billionaires like Marcus and corporations like Home Depot are currently King of the Hill. But they want to believe that they created the hill.

Republicans are happy to tell them that they did. Democrats, on the other hand, tell the story this way: Business in the United States has always been a game played under certain rules. Under the rules of the 1970s and the decades that followed, Home Depot succeeded and Marcus became a multi-billionaire. We don’t begrudge his success, or the success of his 17-year-old cart-pushing millionaire employee either (assuming that guy really exists). Marcus won the game and captured the prize, so congratulations to him.

[see more Loren Fishman cartoons at https://humoresquecartoons.com/ ]

But we’d like to shift the rules so that in the future the workplace becomes safer and less discriminatory, so that workers don’t have to go bankrupt if they or their children need serious medical care, and so that those cart-pushers who don’t rise to be regional presidents still make a wage that lets them feed their families without food stamps. With those amendments, we want the game to continue, and businesspeople to keep on winning or losing according to how well they play.

Maybe Marcus and his fellow Kings of the Hill would win the game under those rules too, or maybe not. But that doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s not the end of free enterprise. Conversely, restoring the rules of the 1970s or 1950s or 1850s won’t make America great again, whatever great and again mean in that context.

Understandably, though, Bernie Marcus and his friends are not going to come around to the Democratic point of view, no matter how reality-based it is. They see themselves as Gods of the Hill, and view our attempts to landscape the hill as sacrilege. I can only hope that their self-deifying religion is still a minority faith.

[1] Preserving a role for the private sector is kind of the point of ObamaCare: How do you get healthcare to millions more Americans without the government taking over everything, by working through the existing insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and clinics? That’s what the conservative Heritage Foundation designed their proto-ObamaCare system to do, way back in 1989.

[2] They also couldn’t have considered his race. I wonder how many black businessmen were getting loans based on their “character and determination” back in the 1970s. I also wonder how much money the banking industry has lost over the years due to lenders making loans unjustified by financial principles. That was a major cause of the S&L crisis of the 1980s. To the extent that current law limits the discretion of federally-insured bankers, it happens for good reasons.

[3] One of my friends recently closed a local bookstore that had existed in the same location since the 1920s. I never heard him complain about government regulation, but Amazon seemed to be a much bigger problem. I suspect a lot of small businesspeople would tell a similar story.

[4] Yeah, you probably did have to be a guy. It was the 70s.

[5] You can argue that retailers sell Chinese products because that’s what’s available, but the big-box stores — especially Walmart — have been instrumental in pushing their suppliers to manufacture overseas.

June 6, 2016 – 8:54 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

Tagged , , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week the Republican establishment continued consolidating behind Donald Trump: Paul Ryan and John McCain are the latest converts. But the endorsement that caught my eye came from Bernie Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and former Jeb Bush donor. In this year when Trump sometimes seems to be the only thing to write about, Marcus managed to endorse Trump while saying almost nothing about him. He spent a little more time denouncing Hillary Clinton, but only in vague and rhetorical terms. (She is “hostile to free enterprise”, an idea that I think would shock her Bernie-supporting critics.)

But a lot more of Marcus’ time and feeling went into talking about Home Depot, and (by extension) himself. To me it sounded like a god complaining that we Democrats don’t worship him well enough, and threatening to unleash his wrath in the form of President Trump. That led me to a general explanation of why the Republican donor class must ultimately come around to supporting the party’s nominee, no matter what: Democrats must be punished because we are heretics. I’ll flesh that idea out in “Preserving the Cult of the Job Creator”, which should appear around 9 EDT.

The weekly summary is made up of several notes that could be separate articles: Muhammad Ali’s death has me reflecting on what it used to mean to be heavyweight champion of the world. In that amazing way he has of drawing attention, Donald Trump was in the middle of two stories I couldn’t ignore: his racist denunciation of the judge in the Trump U fraud lawsuit, and his diatribe against the press corps for daring to check his claims about donations to veterans groups. I also had to comment on the zoo gorilla who was killed in Cincinnati after a 3-year-old fell into his enclosure, and in particular on the storm of criticism unleashed on the kid’s mother. And I’ll close with the discovery that a viral photo might not mean what we all assumed it did.

June 6, 2016 – 7:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (5)