The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s been a busy week on the Sift.

Last Monday’s “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?” is close to 19,000 page views and is still running. It has moved into 4th place on the Sift’s greatest hits list, passing one of my favorites “One Word Turns the Tea Party Around” at 18K. At this rate it should run past “Why I am Not a Libertarian” at 24K. But “Six True Things Politicians Can’t Say” at 69K and “The Distress of the Privileged” at 316K are still a long way out there. (I wonder if other blogs’ hit distributions look like that, with such extreme outliers. A typical featured post gets a few hundred hits, not counting the people who subscribe.)

Anyway, I’ve spent a bunch of this week responding to comments, which is why the Link of the Day hasn’t been even close to daily.

This week I’m going to take a different angle on the race theme with a review of Daniel Sharfstein’s book The Invisible Line: a secret history of race in America. It’s a generation-by-generation look at three American families who crossed the color line from black to white, eventually forgetting their black ancestors. It is both an amazing perspective on what it has meant to be white or black at various points in American history, and a meditation on just how socially constructed the whole notion of “race” is. (Spoiler: One of the families joins the Confederate aristocracy and includes a senator who played a role in ending Reconstruction.)

I called the article “Are You Sure You’re White?”. I realize that title implicitly leaves out my non-white readers, who I hope will forgive me and read the article anyway. (I think you’ll like it.) I couldn’t think of any more inclusive titles that would be nearly so clickable.

Beyond that, the weekly summary will try to catch up with what’s going on in Ukraine and Venezuela. The 5-year anniversary of the Stimulus brought a lot of retrospective debate. A series of state legislatures are considering bills that would redefine “religious freedom” as “freedom to discriminate against gays”. And I’ll end with NBC’s Brian Williams performing “Rapper’s Delight”.

February 24, 2014 – 6:15 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Déjà vu

If I had ever been here before
I would probably know just what to do.
Don’t you?

— David Crosby, “Déjà vu” (1970)

This week’s featured posts are “Sam We Am” and “What Should ‘Racism’ Mean?“

This week everybody was talking about Michael Sam and the NFL

I cover this in detail in “Sam We Am“. It’s part of this week’s déjà vu theme: The arguments we’re hearing against Sam joining the NFL are the same ones that get trotted out — and usually defeated — whenever some new group wants to be included somewhere. And they’re almost exactly the ones that the public just rejected in 2011 when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was being repealed. As a result, public discussions that used to take months to play out are happening in days.

Friday we got a better view of what Sam might be walking into with the release of the independent report the NFL commissioned on the locker-room culture of the Miami Dolphins. The Dolphins bullying story broke in November, when Jonathan Martin left the team and Richie Incognito was suspended.

After a thorough examination of the facts, we conclude that three starters on the Dolphins offensive line, Richie Incognito, John Jerry and Mike Pouncey, engaged in a pattern of harassment directed at not only Martin, but also another young Dolphins offensive lineman, whom we refer to as Player A for confidentiality reasons, and a member of the training staff, whom we refer to as the Assistant Trainer. We find that the Assistant Trainer repeatedly was targeted with racial slurs and other racially derogatory language. Player A frequently was subjected to homophobic name-calling and improper physical touching. Martin was taunted on a persistent basis with sexually explicit remarks about his sister and his mother and at times ridiculed with racial insults and other offensive comments.

and more advances for same-sex marriage

In another example of déjà vu, you can add Virginia to the list of states (Utah, Oklahoma, …) where federal judges have thrown out the state constitution’s same-sex-marriage ban after last summer’s Windsor decision. And Kentucky now has to recognize marriages performed in other states.

Like the debate over Michael Sam, these cases have a same-old-same-old quality. No matter how many times judges shoot down their arguments, traditional-marriage-only advocates offer nothing new. In her Virginia decision, Judge Allen repeated what all the other judges have been saying:

The legitimate purposes proffered by the Proponents for the challenged laws — to promote conformity to the traditions and heritage of a majority of Virginia’s citizens, to perpetuate a generally-recognized deference to the state’s will pertaining to domestic relations laws, and, finally, to endorse “responsible procreation” — share no rational link with Virginia Marriage Laws being challenged.

These arguments have become batting-practice pitches, not serious attempts to strike the same-sex couples out. The obvious implication is that the Religious Right’s quiver is empty, and that (while there’s still considerable mopping up to do) the national debate is over, at least as far as the law goes.

and — surprise! — a clean debt ceiling extension

President Obama signed it Saturday. The Tea Party can’t hold the world economy hostage again until March 15, 2015.

John Boehner allowed this vote in the House (and was one of only 28 Republicans to vote yes) and Mitch McConnell voted to kill Ted Cruz’ filibuster. You’ve got to figure they looked at the political fallout of the October crisis and said, “We’re not doing that again.”

It probably also means that Mitch McConnell is more afraid of Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes than of his Tea Party challenger in the Republican primary. Still, outside-group ads like this one from the Senate Conservatives Fund can’t be doing McConnell any good.

There’s a rude justice to lines like: “Mitch McConnell is trying to bully conservatives just like the IRS is.” The GOP leadership helped create this fantasy world. Now they have to live in it.

and the Republican Civil War starting to get real

The NYT reported:

“I’ve been told by a number of donors to our ‘super PAC’ that they’ve received calls from senior Republican senators,” said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, which is supporting challengers to Republican incumbents across the country. The message from these donors was blunt: “I can’t give to you because I’ve been told I won’t have access to Republican leadership,” Mr. Kibbe said. “So they’re playing hardball.”

Interfering with the donor base really is hardball. TPM commented: “It’s hard to overstate the animosity that House GOP leaders feel for outside tea party groups these days.”

and the Michael Dunn verdict

Guilty, but not of murder. It’s hard not to see this as another racial statement by a Florida jury. If a black adult had sprayed bullets around a car of white boys, I find it hard to imagine a jury taking his I-thought-I-saw-a-gun defense seriously.

Sunday on MSNBC’s “Disrupt with Karen Finney“, Faith Jenkins reacted like this:

Every racial stereotype you could possibly advance about a young black teen, Dunn used it: thug, gangster, rap music. … We see from the Zimmerman trial and now with this trial, some sort of perfect defense emerging when you kill a young black kid. All you have to do is say, “I was in fear for my life.” “They were reaching for my gun.” or “They had a gun.” … and then “They said they were going to kill me.” … That seems to be the perfect defense now.

and Comcast’s bid to take over Time Warner Cable

The deal valued at $45 billion says a lot about the way antitrust law has been interpreted since the Reagan administration. Comcast argues that the two cable companies don’t compete in many markets (and it’s willing to spin off the TWC franchises in those areas), so consumers shouldn’t see any difference.

But the full impact of the merger hits in two ways: It limits the number of companies who might come up with a new model entirely; but more important, it gives the new Comcast an even larger bulk it can throw between producers and consumers. I talked about this phenomenon in 2012 in “Monopoly’s Role in Inequality“. In that piece I argued for transparent markets that would make common carriers out of middlemen like the cable companies. Instead, we have opaque markets, where giant media conglomerates duke it out with giant distribution networks.

In an opaque market, the way to get rich is not to produce things, but to build middleman power that allows you to dictate terms up and down the supply chain.

At the time, I used a skuffle between Viacom and DirectTV to illustrate.

Maybe you couldn’t watch Jon Stewart for a week, but the problem had nothing to do with either you or Jon Stewart. He wasn’t asking for a raise; you weren’t balking at the price of watching the Daily Show. But both you and Jon were irrelevant when two giant middlemen had a power struggle. … These middlemen outweigh both you and Jon Stewart. If Jon doesn’t work for one of the six big media companies, he can’t reach a major audience. If you don’t deal with either DirectTV or a cable monopoly, your TV choices shrink considerably.

That’s the threat. Not that you’ll have fewer companies to deal with in your town, but that the industry will continue to re-configure for the benefit of middlemen rather than producers or consumers.

I hope The Week and Quartz are right when they predict the merger won’t go through.

and you also might be interested in …

Robert Draper’s profile of Wendy Davis in the NYT Magazine puts her in a good light, but its title — “Can Wendy Davis Have it All?” — exemplifies the gender double-standard he criticizes. Nobody ever asks whether a male candidate can “have it all”.

The WSJ’s Valentine’s Day advice to women comes from Susan Patton.

Think about it: If you spend the first 10 years out of college focused entirely on building your career, when you finally get around to looking for a husband you’ll be in your 30s, competing with women in their 20s. That’s not a competition in which you’re likely to fare well.

I think your first mistake was looking for relationship advice in The Wall Street Journal.

I know you’re all just dying to know what connection religion might have to porn addiction, so here it is:

There was no connection between the religious devotion of the participants and how much porn they actually viewed, the studies showed. However, stronger religious faith was linked with more negative moral attitudes about pornography, which in turn was associated with greater perceived addiction.

Three Republican senators have outlined a plan to replace ObamaCare — years after Republicans floated the “repeal and replace” slogan. We’ll see if the GOP leadership actually gets behind the plan, or if it’s just a we-have-a-plan-too puff of smoke.

The WaPo suggests several reasons the plan would be worse than ObamaCare, but in some sense that misses the point. ObamaCare, after all, is based on the Republican alternative to HillaryCare in the 1990s. That Republican “plan” evaporated as soon as HillaryCare was off the table, and when Republicans controlled both Congress and the White House during the Bush administration, they did not pursue it. When Obama gave them a serious opportunity to implement the ideas they had said they supported, they denounced it as “socialism” and claimed it was unconstitutional.

Voters need to ask themselves whether the same thing would happen here. I think it would: The day Republicans successfully repeal ObamaCare, their “alternative” will be history … until a future Democratic president revives it in 2030 and it becomes socialism too.

Republicans in the Missouri legislature have a new plan for pushing schools to “teach the controversy” about evolution.

I keep thinking that someday, as the 1% accumulate more and more power, workers are going to rediscover unions. Well, it didn’t happen this week in Chattanooga: The UAW failed to organize the VW plant, in spite of VW’s neutrality in the matter.

You know who wasn’t neutral? Tennessee’s Republican Senator Bob Corker, who claimed that unionization would send production of a new VW SUV to Mexico — even though VW management had claimed otherwise. Also Republican State Senator Bo Watson, who threatened a loss of state incentives if the plant went union.

Whether those threats swayed the election or not, it hard to argue with Business Week: “If the UAW couldn’t win this one, what could they win?”

February 17, 2014 – 1:21 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

What Should “Racism” Mean?

There’s a type of faux scandal that’s been happening … well, I haven’t exactly kept track, but it seems like there’s a new one every month or two. They all fit this pattern: President Obama does something that symbolically asserts his status as president, and the right-wing press gets outraged by how he’s “disrespecting” something-or-other related to the presidency.

So, for example, in January, 2010 this photo caused FoxNation.com to ask whether Obama was “disrespecting the Oval Office” by putting his feet up on the antique desk.

Of course, it didn’t take long to uncover similar photos of previous presidents, none of which had raised any particular outrage at the time. But everybody forgot again, and so we had an almost identical flap last September. “This just makes me furious,” one woman tweeted. “He was raised so badly.”

Or remember last May when marines held umbrellas over President Obama and visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. Horrors! He’s treating our revered warriors like servants! How dare he! It was front-page news.

Once again, it wasn’t too hard to find similar photos of previous presidents, which weren’t front-page news — or any kind of outrage at all.
Other such “scandals” involve the First Lady: Did you know that Michelle had the audacity to wear an expensive gown to a recent state dinner, like first ladies have been doing, well, forever? Compare to this 2005 WaPo column in which Laura Bush is said to look “regal” — and that’s a compliment. Until 2009, the First Lady was supposed to look regal. Remember Jackie Kennedy? But when Michelle dresses up, she’s Marie Antoinette.

The Obama’s vacations are another issue, and how much taxpayers spend to protect them outside the White House. But of course when the Bush twins celebrated their 25th birthdays in Buenos Aires, nobody cared what it cost the Secret Service to keep them safe in an exotic locale. They were the president’s daughters, so of course we protected them.

The entire White House lifestyle is an issue: The Obamas are “living large” claimed National Review (and mentioned Marie Antoinette again). The Washington Post fact-checker investigated and concluded: “there appears to be no appreciable difference between Obama’s expenses and Bush’s.” If you read the NR article carefully — and most of the other articles raising this faux issue — you’ll realize they never said there was. It’s just that the Bushes living large never bothered anybody.

Town Hall criticized the extravagance of having Beyonce perform at the Obama White House. But when Frank Sinatra performed for the Reagans, nobody looked at it that way. Why would they?

Even the Obamas’ Christmas cards became an issue. This one, from 2011, disrespects the Christian holiday because it is secular and features the president’s dog:

But this one, from the Bushes in 2005, is fine.

I could go on and on. Whenever President Obama acts like the President of the United States, or the Obamas act like the First Family, it just looks wrong to a lot of people.

So here’s the $64,000 question: Is that racist?

It depends on what you think racist means. Conservatives will not only answer the question “No”, they’ll be insulted that you even raised it (and will probably launch into their canned everybody-who-disagrees-with-Obama-is-a-racist-to-you-people riff). That’s because conservatives have adopted a very restricted definition of racism: Racism is conscious hatred towards people of another race.

So, those white folks who didn’t even notice when Reagan’s or JFK’s feet were on the desk, but who see Obama’s and think “He was raised so badly.” — are they also secretly thinking “Who does that uppity nigger think he is, acting like he’s a real president or something?” Maybe a few here or there, but mostly no. They aren’t consciously hating Obama because he’s black. But they can’t look at a black president the same way they looked at the 43 white presidents. Things just look different when Obama does them.

What do you call that?

I’m asking that question seriously, not rhetorically. 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 all the same, lots of whites look at Obama and can’t think “president” without thinking “black president” — and they go on to judge his actions more harshly than those of white presidents. They go on to treat him with less respect than white presidents have always received — like interrupting the State of the Union to yell “You lie!” or questioning his birth certificate when there was never any reason to do so. (This satire, which applies the same standards to Ronald Reagan’s birth certificate, is hilarious precisely because it would never have been taken seriously.)

Congressmen saying it would be “a dream come true” to impeach the President (while admitting they have no evidence of an impeachable offense), or listening patiently while constituents publicly say the President “should be executed as an enemy combatant” — that would have been unthinkable during the 43 white administrations. But today it’s considered acceptable behavior.

If you don’t want to call it racism, fine. But it’s a real phenomenon; it needs a name. What do you call it?

I’ve narrowed my focus to President Obama, but really the phenomenon is much broader. For example, read Tim Wise’s “What if the Tea Party Were Black?” or just about anything about Trayvon Martin. If Michael Dunn had been a black man shooting up a car full of white boys, I doubt jurors would have bought his I-thought-I-saw-a-gun argument.

For a lot of whites who don’t harbor any conscious racial malice, things just look different when blacks do them. What do you call that?

Teasing out the different stances that might be called “racism” is at least half the value of Ian Haney Lopez’ recent book Dog Whistle Politics. Lopez notes that racism changes from one era to the next, and somebody changes it. “Racism is not disappearing,” he says, “it’s adapting.”

Lopez uses the word “racism” for most of the possible meanings, and differentiates with adjectives. Here are some of the ones he finds:

  • racism-as-hate. The most restrictive definition, and the most comforting for whites. “For the public at large, racism-as-hate provides self-protecting clarity: if racists are like those in the 1950s who screamed at black school children and burned crosses, then most everyone can safely conclude that they, at least, are not racists. … Since conservatives on the Supreme Court adopted a malice conception of racism in 1979, when using this approach the Court has rejected every claim of discrimination against nonwhites brought before it.”
  • structural or institutional racism. This is racial injustice that seems to be the fault of nobody in particular, because it’s embedded in the way society works. Vicious cycles (like poverty leading to dysfunctional behavior which leads back to poverty) may trace back to past sins like slavery or Jim Crow, but now they are self-replicating. “Structural racism is racism without racists. All that said, precisely because institutional racism implies a need to change society, it was rejected long ago by conservatives, including those on the Supreme Court who repudiated this understanding of racism in the early 1970s.”
  • implicit bias. This is the it-just-looks-different response I have been describing, or the kind that shows up in Implicit Association Test you can take online.
  • commonsense racism. “The social world through which we move reflects centuries of racism that extends right up to the present. But this is hard to grasp in its particulars. Instead, we see clearly only the results, and with the underlying causes hidden, we tend to accept the extant world as a testament to the implacable truth of racial stereotypes.” The commonsense racists “are not hate-filled bigots but decent folks who see racial injustice as a normal feature of society. … For many, it simply seems ‘true,’ an unquestioned matter of commonsense, that blacks prefer welfare to work, that undocumented immigrants breed crime, and that Islam spawns violence.”
  • strategic racism. New appeals to racial prejudice and new rationalizations for racial injustice don’t create themselves. When the old racial manipulations stop working, somebody figures out new ones. “Strategic racism refers to purposeful efforts to use racial animus as leverage to gain material wealth, political power, or heightened social standing. … [B]ecause strategic racism is strategic, it is not fundamentally about race. … [S]trategic racists act out of avarice rather than animus.”

Lopez retells a lot of American history to illustrate how when one avenue for racial injustice was blocked, another was usually found in short order. (His discussion of how in the Reconstruction Era convict leasing developed into a new form of forced black labor to replace slavery, and continued in that form well into the 20th century, was new and eye-opening to me.) He sees this not as blind evolution, but as clever people working out the new arrangements and constructing ways to rationalize them to the masses.

Lopez also describes the usual course of racial conversation these days: If you introduce any of the above ideas into a conversation, conservatives will interpret it as an explicit or veiled accusation of racism-as-hate; you are saying they are like the white supremacists who yelled obscenities at the black little girls trying to integrate public schools. They will experience this as an injustice, and then see themselves as the victims rather than the people whose suffering you were trying to point out.

Strategic racists have turned this into

the rhetorical punch, parry, and kick of dog whistle racial jujitsu. Here are the basic moves: (1) punch racism into the conversation through references to culture, behavior, and class; (2) parry claims of race-baiting by insisting that absent a direct reference to biology or the use of a racial epithet, there can be no racism; (3) kick up the racial attack by calling any critics the real racists for mentioning race and thereby “playing the race card.”

“Most racists,” Lopez recognizes, like the South African whites Lopez met during the apartheid era “are good people. This is not a book about bad people. It is about all of us.” Most whites — even the most conservative whites — are not haters. But so many on the Right have been trained in the recast-yourself-as-the-victim reflex that it has become hard to have any kind of discussion at all about the more subtle and pervasive forms of racism. And until we get to the bottom of that, our democracy will always be vulnerable to the manipulations of the strategic racists.

February 17, 2014 – 11:12 am Categories: Articles | Comments (131)

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Sam We Am

We’ve seen this movie before, we know the lines, and we know what role we’re going to wish we had played.

Last week, All-American defensive tackle Michael Sam let the world know that whichever NFL team drafts him will have the first openly gay player in American major league sports.*

This week the sports world responded, and the discussion had a quality I didn’t expect: It was old. As ESPN said when they broke the story:

In 2014, “Gay Man to Enter Workforce” has the everyday-occurrence sound of a headline in The Onion.

The objections to Sam joining the NFL rehash the ones the public just rejected in the debate over ending Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell and letting gays serve openly in the military. If you look further back in history, those arguments are a rehash of what Truman heard when he let blacks into the military, or Branch Rickey heard when he brought Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers. (And they’re not that different from the arguments against letting women into businessmen’s clubs or blacks into white schools.)

By now, we’ve got this conversation’s number. It’s 42.

We’re told NFL teams will avoid drafting Sam so as not to screw up their “locker room culture”. In 2011 and in 1948, people worried about military “unit cohesion” and “morale”. It was code for: “We already have bigots, and they’ll be upset.”

That code doesn’t fool anybody anymore. If bigots cause a problem, it’s on them.

We’re told players will feel oogy, because, you know … showers. We’ve heard that before: about gays in the military, and about blacks, too, if you go back that far. It’s hard to reconstruct the argument now — I guess something about blacks was supposed to contaminate whites in some way — but in 1948 it was a big deal: Young white men from Jim Crow states couldn’t even use the same urinals as black men, so how could the Army expect them to shower together?

We’re told the NFL isn’t “ready” for gay players, as if baseball had been ready for Jackie Robinson or racing for Danica Patrick. Decades ago that seemed like a good point — maybe if we prepare for a few more years everything will go smoothly — but today it’s a fat pitch, a batting-practice lob. Ta-Nehisi Coates hit it over the fence like this:

The NFL has no moral right to be “ready” for a gay player, which is to say it has no right to discriminate against gay men at its leisure

In 2014 we know how this movie comes out, and we know the lines. That’s how people you never would have picked out as gay rights advocates are able to be so forceful and eloquent. Like Dale Hansen, the sports anchor at ABC’s Channel 8 in Dallas:

Since you know the lines, you get to pick your role. We can all be Atticus Finch this time, if we want to. Former NFL receiver Donte Stallworth had the strong-but-reasonable thing down pat when he wrote this for ThinkProgress on Friday:

Michael Sam will only be a distraction if his organization, head coach, and teammates let him become one because of their own biases and lack of leadership. … In my experience with Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots, I feel he would handle this by not making it a big deal to begin with. Bill would walk in on day one, as he does every year, and tell his players that he expected them to treat everyone in this organization with respect and a professional attitude. Anything less in that organization is intolerable.

What about the other Super Bowl coach Stallworth played for?

John Harbaugh, the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, … [would] tell players to handle their problems in the locker room as a family would. If they had something to say, they should discuss it with each other, man to man, brother to brother, as a family. Harbaugh would tell us that if there were any issues among the team that we should hash it out in the locker room or a team meeting. If that failed, he’d tell us to come see him in his office or to go see general manager Ozzie Newsome, who has an open door policy and is always there for players to have an honest talk. Those guys would help players figure out their options or other ways to address whatever problems they had.

Those are separate ways to handle it, but they’re both effective because they both address the fundamental point: that this isn’t something that should distract players from doing the job they’re being paid to do. When you have strong leadership from your head coach and other players in the locker room, that’s an easy message to send. When you don’t, it means your problems are much bigger than a gay football player.

Usually, people give inordinate credit to the fig-leaf arguments of the status quo, and it takes a long time to see through them. But because we’ve been through this before and recently, this story has moved really fast. In just a few days, the question has flipped from “Will Michael Sam be a problem?” to “Is your team professional enough for Michael Sam?” After all, Sam’s college teammates at Missouri could handle having a gay teammate. They went 12-2 and finished the year ranked #5 in the country.** If your NFL team can’t deal with the situation as well as a bunch of amateur college kids, what’s the matter with you?

Overnight, the “manly” reaction flipped from being homophobic to having the maturity to respect your teammates, even if they’re different from you.

Before his announcement, the consensus judgment on Michael Sam was: He won’t be a superstar in the NFL, but he can play. He can help a team win games. At some point in the middle rounds of the draft, he’ll be the best player on the board.

Sam didn’t change any of that by telling us he’s gay.

So when he’s at the top of the board, the onus won’t be on him, it will be on the general managers of the teams. What are you saying, GMs, if you let him go by and draft somebody less talented? You’re saying that you think your players (who you signed) are immature and unprofessional, and that your coaches (who you hired) don’t have what it takes to handle them. You’re saying that you care more about making your job easy than about winning.

When you reach that point, NFL general manager, I’ve only got two words for you: Man up.

* Jason Collins would have had that distinction if any NBA team had signed him this year. But he was a journeyman veteran whose career might have over anyway.

** Missouri students deserve some credit too. When 14 members of the Westboro Baptist Church hate group came to campus to demonstrate against Sam, hundreds of students wearing “Stand with Sam” buttons and “We are all CoMo Sexuals” shirts formed a human wall. (Googling “como sexual” didn’t get me anything enlightening. I assume it means Missouri (MO) students together (co) to support people of all sexual preferences.)

February 17, 2014 – 8:40 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

As I channel-scanned the Sunday talk shows, they all seemed to be discussing Michael Sam and the NFL. But I didn’t scan through anybody having my reaction to the story: Didn’t we just do this? The issues — group morale, taking showers, and so on — are the same ones we just hashed through in ending don’t-ask-don’t-tell in the military. And if you look back far enough, the same arguments showed up when the issue was blacks in the military or in sports.

I think that’s why so many people-you-wouldn’t-have-expected have jumped into this argument with so much force and eloquence: It’s all still fresh in our heads. We’ve seen this movie, we already know the lines, and we know what role we’re going to wish we had played.

So the first article to come out today will be about that. There’s a longer article about the many ways to define racism that I’ve been working on for a while and might get done today. Not sure about that.

The weekly summary continues the football theme by looking at the new report on the Miami Dolphins bullying incident, and it continues the déjà vu theme by looking at the Kentucky and Virginia same-sex marriage cases: The Religious Right keeps making the same arguments, no matter how many times judges knock them down. So all these rulings look the same.

Then we get to the dog that didn’t bark this week: the completely non-dramatic extension of the debt ceiling. That’s one of many signs that the Republican Civil War is getting serious. Other news this week: the Michael Dunn verdict, the UAW’s defeat in Chattanooga, Comcast’s attempt to buy Time Warner Cable, and a bunch of other stuff.

The Michael Sam article should come out soon, and the rest may run late (as I try to figure out whether the racism article is ready).

February 17, 2014 – 7:32 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Good Intentions

Be humble about the limitations of your good intention. If someone is hurt or triggered by your words, it isn’t because they failed to understand your intentions. It is because your intentions don’t have the power to shape the meaning of your words in the larger social world.

— Feminist Hulk, “How to Like Woody Allen on Facebook“

This week’s featured posts are: “9 Things I Think About Education and the Common Core” and “What the CBO Really Said about ObamaCare and the Economy“.

This week everybody was talking about ObamaCare’s effect on jobs

I cover this in detail in “What the CBO Really Said about ObamaCare and the Economy“.

Deep in an appendix of a new CBO report is a projection that, for a variety of reasons, workers will choose to work 2% fewer hours under ObamaCare than they would if they were desperate for health insurance. Over the whole economy, that totals up to 2.3 million full-time jobs. That got covered as if the CBO had said “ObamaCare will get 2.3 million workers fired.”

Eventually the fact-checkers weighed in and got the story right (raising the question of why the original reporters couldn’t be bothered to check facts). But the damage is done. For years, we’ll be hearing that “the CBO says ObamaCare will kill jobs”, the same way that we keep hearing “the IRS targeted conservative groups” and “Obama left people to die in Benghazi” long after both claims have proven false.

and Philip Seymour Hoffman

I’ve seen Hoffman in a few movies and appreciated that he was a very good actor, but I wasn’t prepared for the number of people who felt personally devastated by his death by heroin overdose at 46.

It’s well known that opinions change when an issue affects someone you know and care about. (Dick Cheney and Rob Portman on same-sex marriage, for example.) Celebrities are people we all feel we know and care about. So now maybe we’ll start paying attention to the growing heroin problem.

and Woody Allen

Last week I linked to Dylan Farrow’s account of being molested at age 7 by Woody Allen. Sunday Allen published his response. (In my mind I can hear Allen’s publicist pleading, “Don’t, Woody. Don’t. … At least let me rewrite it. You’re not doing yourself any favors here. Even people who believe you aren’t going to like you.” But you can’t convince a writer he needs somebody else to write for him.) Dylan then countered.

Allen repeated the defense he made at the time: Dylan was coached by her furious mother Mia Farrow, who was divorcing Allen after discovering his affair with Farrow’s 21-year-old adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (whom he subsequently married).

Not that I doubt Dylan hasn’t come to believe she’s been molested, but if from the age of 7 a vulnerable child is taught by a strong mother to hate her father because he is a monster who abused her, is it so inconceivable that after many years of this indoctrination the image of me Mia wanted to establish had taken root?

Zoe Zolbrod had already addressed that possibility two days before (in a generally insightful Salon article discussing how the Allen/Farrow controversy interacts with the public’s pre-existing misconceptions about child abuse).

None of that is impossible, but it’s far less likely than people seem to believe. … [R]esearch shows that it is not more common for accusations made during custody battles to be proved false than it is for any other sex abuse accusation, which is to say that it’s not very common at all. … Research also shows that children are not nearly so suggestible on the topic of sex abuse as previously believed, especially school-aged children.

Kids make unimpressive witnesses because the details of their stories tend to shift depending on who’s questioning them and how the questions are phrased. So they often look like they’re making it all up when they’re not. But inducing false traumatic memories that persist into adulthood … that’s pretty difficult. If Mia Farrow has figured it out, I’m sure there are totalitarian governments that would like to speak with her.

and you also might be interested in …

Chescaleigh gives a lesson in a basic life skill: How to apologize when you offend people you didn’t mean to offend.

Here’s something you might look at if you’re interested in ethical investing: Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructre (HASI). (Bear in mind that nothing in my training or background qualifies me to give investment advice, so you should make your own judgment rather than trust mine. Also, since I’ve already bought some shares, I have a conflict of interest. Conceivably, if all my readers invested their life savings in HASI, it might drive the price up and make me a profit. Buying obscure stocks and then selling them after you’ve convinced other people to drive up the price is a con known as pump-and-dump.)

The idea is that there are many situations where sustainable energy investments would make long-term sense, if only you could raise the capital without paying too much interest. And even if you could, the increased debt might make your finances look shaky or involve you in market risks that are tangential to your business or public mission. So lots of economically sensible sustainable-energy investments don’t get made.

HASI specializes in finding those situations and providing the capital. For example, HASI owns the rooftop solar array on a Coast Guard base in Puerto Rico, and sells the electricity back to the Coast Guard. You can find other examples on the HASI web site.

It’s structured as a real estate investment trust, so it focuses on yield rather than growth (and may complicate your tax return). Current yield — which, as they say, is no guarantee of future yields — is 6.7%.

The Bill Nye vs. a creationist debate happened.

I tuned out about halfway through, but my impression is that the creationist championed such an extreme version of the theory that he probably did his cause a disservice. A lot of people who might support a God-had-something-to-do-with-it position are not going to buy that the fossils were all laid down by a global flood 4,000 years ago, or that language diversity is due to a literal Tower of Babel sometime after that.

A new front in the war on women: Right-wing groups are boycotting Girl Scout cookies. It sounds like satire, but it isn’t.

Now that an All-American college football player has announced that he’s gay, the NFL is likely to have its first openly gay player next season.

When someone at Oklahoma Rep. Jim Bridenstine‘s town hall meeting says President Obama “should be executed as an enemy combatant” and the next questioner says we should “impeach the SOB”, the congressman does nothing to rein them in or cool them down. Instead, he finds other parts of their statements that he can agree with.

Pay attention to John Sarbanes proposed law, the Government By the People Act. It parallels proposals in Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost. Without a new Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment, you can’t limit the amount rich donors can spend on political campaigns. But you can encourage and subsidize small donors to create a path to Congress that doesn’t go through the rich donors.

Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews the mother of a stand-your-ground victim. .

Ezra Klein’s diagnosis of what’s wrong with journalism sounds a lot like my diagnosis in Confessions of a Blogger in 2006. But Ezra has youth, energy, talent, and big-money backing. I eagerly wait to see what he’ll do with it.

and let’s end with something amusing

I’m sure parents will appreciate (and may contribute to) the Reasons My Son is Crying blog. Here’s one:

February 10, 2014 – 1:09 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

9 Things I Think About Education and the Common Core

The problem isn’t the standards and it’s not even the tests. It’s what people want to do with the scores.

For months, friends have been asking me, “What do you think about the Common Core?” (You get that kind of question when you write a political blog.) The first time I responded “Huh?” Then I started googling around, and my ignorance turned into confusion: The Common Core itself is little more than two lists — one for Mathematics and one for Language Arts — describing the knowledge and skills that children should be acquiring in various school grades. Nothing on either list is obviously controversial. No “learn how to perform a wide variety of sexual acts” or “master methods for invoking Satan with or without human sacrifice”.

But if you wander into the wrong discussions, the vitriol is intense and it’s very hard to hold a discussion on track. You see, the CC is not just a set of standards for education; it’s Step #1 of half a dozen contradictory conspiracy theories. That’s because the CC sits in the intersection of at least four different culture wars.

  • local control vs. national standards. Parents like the idea that they can walk into the office of somebody — a principal or a local superintendent — who has the power to fix whatever they think is wrong with their kids’ school. But Americans in general hate the United States’ poor showing in international comparisons, so many of us wish we could impose higher standards nationwide.
  • public schools vs. privatization. To one side, public schools represent community, the common good, the sense that we’re all in this together, and our shared commitment to any child who wants to learn. To the other, the public school system is the quintessential failed government bureaucracy. The sooner it gets replaced by a system of competing entrepreneurial private schools, the better.
  • basic skills vs. progressive education. Is the point of K-12 education to instill a firm grounding in the 3 R’s? Or is it to awaken (or at least not stifle) a child’s creative intelligence so that s/he can cope with a future whose requirements we can’t predict? (I’m old enough to remember a previous version of this battle: New Math. That controversy spawned this classic Tom Lehrer song, which he introduces by saying: “In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing, rather than to get the right answer.” The audience laughs nervously.) This taps into an even deeper religious battle: Should we be teaching our children the eternal truths laid down by God and tradition? Or does culture progress in such a way that what used to be central may now be trivial, and what seems wrong to us may someday become right?
  • individualized education vs. standardized testing. Each child and each classroom is a unique bundle of talents and interests. Each day is roiled by waves of happenstance that a wise teacher is creative enough to use rather than fight. (The kids can’t stop watching the bird building a nest on the ledge outside the window, so today’s the day to jump ahead in the syllabus — or invent a new unit on the fly — and talk about birds.) But how can we root out the bad, lazy teachers or identify the dysfunctional, under-performing schools unless we rigorously define what the kids are supposed to learn when, and have objective tests that determine whether they’re learning it?

In addition, there’s a battle-of-the-billionaires going on. The Gates Foundation is pushing the CC, while the Koch brothers are fighting it. Neither of these big-money interests believes in public schools in anything like their current form, so there’s a third front represented by anti-CC pro-teacher liberals like Diane Ravitch.

So whether the venue is liberal or conservative, Common Core discussions have a way of wandering off into bizarre stereotypes and dystopian futures. It’s easy to forget that you’re talking about two lists of knowledge and skills (that don’t mention Satan).

Where I’m coming from. Like everybody, I have my own biases: I went to high school during the era of experimentation in the 1970s, and my public high school (in the small town of Quincy, Illinois, which Time in 1975 described as “an unlikely place for an educational mecca“) was — for the short time I was there — a national leader in new ideas. I went through Quincy High’s Project to Individualize Education (PIE), which today sounds like a hippie fantasy, even in Quincy. I organized my own schedule week-to-week, took tests whenever I felt like I had mastered the material, and had enough free time to write a novel during my senior year. (It’s not very good; if you ask to read it I will claim it’s lost.) I was also the student newspaper’s reporter at Quincy’s annual education conferences, where I (briefly) got to meet legends like John Holt.

I never bought into Holt’s big theories about un-schooling society, but I did retain this much: Everybody is interested in something, and everything is interconnected. So the best kind of education starts with what kids want to know and leads them to what they need to know.

My other prior opinions are influenced by my sister’s experiences. She recently retired from a career teaching elementary school in both public and private systems. She left with a lot of teaching still in her, but the public school system in Chattanooga had squeezed all the joy out the profession.

Finally, one of my friends from grad school has taken a public position in favor of the CC: Sol Friedberg is known to the world as the chair of the Boston College math department, but he’s known to me as the guy I drove from Chicago to San Diego with in a $200 car. (During that trip he convinced me that I ought to pay more attention to the woman I’ve now been married to for nearly 30 years.) His op-ed on CC appeared recently in the LA Times.

So bearing all that in mind, let’s think this through from the beginning. My first four conclusions are positive.

1. There’s a legitimate national interest in education. Public schools began in a low-mobility era when every small town educated its own future citizens and even its own leaders and professionals. The local factory knew that its workers were coming from the public schools, and the old people all had grandchildren there.

Today it’s different. My sister and I took our good educations and left town, while my parents’ doctor came from India and their grandchildren grew up in Tennessee. Today, the local public school is a special interest that mainly matters to parents and teachers. So left to the local political process, all but the richest communities will underfund their schools. Local curriculum decisions will revolve around religion and political ideology rather than the interests of children, because more voters have religious and ideological passions than have a connection to the local kids.

But not even the United States can import all the smart people it needs, and we can’t have government-of-the-people if the people are ignorant. So those kids being taught anti-science nonsense in Louisiana or stuck in dead-end schools in inner-city Baltimore are going to choose your presidents and maybe even do your brain surgery. So it’s your business.

2. On a large enough timescale, national standards make sense. Whatever state they’re from, high school graduates compete for places in the same colleges, or for jobs in an increasingly globalized market. It makes sense for “high school graduate” to mean one thing, rather than fifty or fifty-thousand different things. I don’t think we want every local school board debating what kids need to know about trigonometry.

Given the mobility of our society, year-by-year standards make sense too. Schools shouldn’t be McDonalds franchises, but when you have to take that new job in New Mexico, your fifth-grader should continue to be a fifth-grader.

The stuff that drove my sister nuts was the finer-scale scheduling: being told not just where her students should be at the end of the year, but what she had to cover week-by-week and even day-by-day.

3. No set of standards is perfect, but these are fine. Ignore whatever commentary you’ve heard; just go look at them. Sure, good students, good teachers, and good schools will aim higher, and the top colleges will expect more. But if all kids came out of high school with this much math and language skill, that would be tremendous.

4. It makes sense to test how well students are reaching these goals. The CC standards themselves are just a list of knowledge and skills, but two state consortia are building tests around them: Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and  Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.

I don’t have any problems with national tests. My problem starts with how the results get used.

5. The standards-adoption process has been undemocratic. The Obama administration all but made Common Core a requirement to qualify for Race to the Top money, which the states desperately needed at the bottom of the Great Recession. And Race to the Top wasn’t debated and passed on its own merits, it was folded into the stimulus.

So on paper it looks like states are choosing to adopt these standards and the tests that go with them. But there has never been an appropriate public discussion, either in Congress or in the state legislatures.

6. High-stakes testing is a bad idea. You can use a traditional metaphor (watched pots) or a scientific one (Heisenberg effect), but the idea is simple: Sometimes watching things too intently screws them up.

In the school-reform movement pushed by the Gates Foundation, tests rule the world. Tests close schools, hold students back, and fire teachers and principals. Even the jobs of mayors and governors ride on test scores. This is where things start to go wrong: The whole system is filled with test-score anxiety, and more time gets spent on how to take tests than on the Civil War. Everyone — students, teachers, principals, all the way up to superintendents and governors — has incentive to cheat, or at least not to catch cheaters. If you can find a way to shuffle low-scoring students out the door, so much the better.

And if your job or your school is in danger, why would you waste time teaching anything that’s not on the test? That’s when principals start micro-managing the classroom and asking teachers: “What test questions did you cover today?”

This process got dramatized in one of the subplots of Season 4 of The Wire: A former cop starts teaching math in a Baltimore school. The story starts down the familiar To Sir With Love super-teacher path, but just as Prez starts getting through to his kids, he’s reprimanded and forced to go back to robotically training them to take the state test.

7. We’re using test scores to scapegoat public schools and their teachers for social problems we’d rather not deal with. My church is in an upscale Boston suburb that has a lot of educated parents, so those are the public-high-school kids I run into. I’m always impressed with how much they know and how well they can think. If they were typical American students in a typical American high school, we wouldn’t be talking about school reform at all.

But think about kids who grow up poor. Their mothers are less likely to have appropriate pre-natal care and nutrition, and more likely to suffer from either drug problems or exposure to toxic chemicals. So right off the bat, poor kids have more learning disabilities. As toddlers, on average they continue to have worse nutrition and less medical care. They are more likely to enter school with undiagnosed sight or hearing problems, not to mention those learning disabilities, which are also probably undiagnosed. They are likely to be raised by less articulate parents in homes with fewer books, so they reach public school knowing far fewer words. Then we crowd them together with other students with similar disadvantages, in schools that aren’t as well equipped as schools professional-class kids go to. If poor kids overcome all that and make average progress during the school year, in the summer they again live with fewer books, fewer piano lessons, and fewer trips to the museum, so they are behind again by fall.

It’s obvious how to fix all that, but nobody wants to pay for it. Nobody wants to pay for pre-natal care or check-ups for toddlers or childhood nutrition or pre-school enrichment programs. Nobody wants to give schools in poor neighborhoods significantly more funding than schools in rich neighborhoods get, even though they need it. Nobody wants to merge their rich school district with the poor school district on the other side of the boundary line. Nobody wants to pay for summer programs or year-round schools. And so on.

It’s much easier to blame the schools in poor neighborhoods and claim that lazy teachers are using poverty as an excuse.

But when you compare our schools to a world-class system, like say Finland’s, the schools themselves are only part of the story. Finland is a socialist country, so it puts enormous resources into making sure kids don’t grow up poor.

8. Super-teachers won’t save us. Somebody’s study says that great teachers can move a class 1.5 grade-years, while bad teachers might only get half a grade-year of progress. From there comes the notion that three great teachers in a row could completely wipe out the gaps between black and white or rich and poor.

My Lutheran elementary school gave us achievement tests every year, and the principal showed me my score chart just before I graduated from 8th grade. In sixth grade, my scores jumped two-and-a-half grade levels. And yes, I had a good teacher that year. But it’s also true that my scores the previous year had been flat, so the jump had just restored the normal trajectory of my education. I sincerely doubt that two more years of great teachers would have raised my test scores by five grade levels.

So can a great teacher get a 1.5-year jump out a class? Maybe, sometimes. Would three in a row get a 4.5-year jump? I doubt it.

9. We won’t get super-teachers by firing the teachers we have. Baseball statistics geeks should understand this. One of the most advanced baseball stats is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). An earlier generation of statistics measured players against the average major-leaguer, but then somebody noticed that teams can’t just whistle up an average major-league shortstop whenever they need one. Some teams go entire decades without managing to fill some key position with an average player. So stats geeks started measuring against the replacement level: the kind of shortstop you can call up from the minor leagues or sign after some other team releases him. They’re not nearly as good as average, but you can always find them.

The same idea works here. If you fire a below-average teacher, you can’t automatically assume that the replacement will be an average teacher. The replacement level might be considerably lower than the average.

The underlying assumption behind the fire-teachers strategy is that teachers are unmotivated, and so need to be made to fear for their jobs. What other profession do we treat this way? Some doctors are certainly better than others, and there are probably patients who die because their doctor wasn’t as good as the best. So should we fire all but the best doctors? Would that motivation push the replacement doctors to be excellent? I kind of doubt it.

Conclusion. So here’s what I think about the Common Core: We could do a lot worse. We should have year-by-year national standards, and we should have tests that measure how well we’re achieving them. That’s not the battle to fight.

The right battle is over what to do with the scores. The Gates program, which influenced both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, is fundamentally misguided. What-test-question-did-you-cover-today education is not good education. (No school trying to attract the children of the rich would work that way.) Get-the-scores-up-or-else is no way to motivate teachers either to work harder or to improve their craft.

You’ve got your conspiracy theory and I’ve got mine. (I think profit-making corporations want public schools labeled as failures so they can get their hands on the billions we spend on education. But that’s a topic for another article.) Common Core is Step #1 in both of them. But I don’t think things get sinister until Step #2.

February 10, 2014 – 11:19 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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What the CBO Really Said about ObamaCare and the Economy

File this under: “Liberal media? What liberal media?”

I doubt the Congressional Budget Office expected The Budget and Economic Outlook 2014 to 2024 to be front-page news. They put out these ten-year look-aheads every six months or so, and they don’t usually get much reaction.

But say some news outlets decided to pay attention. You might expect — the CBO probably expected — reporters to focus on the summary. After all, that’s why people write summaries to 182-page government reports with eight appendices. In particular, you might expect articles to focus on the summary’s first line:

The federal budget deficit has fallen sharply during the past few years, and it is on a path to decline further this year and next year.

That sounds like a big deal. Very Serious People have been telling us for years (or more accurately, since Inauguration Day 2009, when they suddenly stopped believing Dick Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter” maxim) that the deficit is going to destroy our entire society. We’re going to turn into Greece, locusts will devour our fields, toads will rain from the sky, and so forth. So the fact that this situation is rapidly improving ought to get the VSPs attention.

The numbers are striking: The combined Bush/Obama budget of FY 2009 (October, 2008 to October 2009) had a $1.4 trillion deficit. (Bush’s first proposal for a FY2009 budget had an $407 billion deficit, which had grown to a projected $1.2 trillion by the time Obama took office, due to the economic collapse at the end of Bush’s term. Obama’s stimulus pushed the deficit the final $200 billion on its way to creating 3.3 million jobs, according to a previous CBO study.) FY 2013 ended in October with a $680 billion deficit, and the CBO projects deficits of $514 billion in FY2014 and $478 billion in FY2015.

At that level, this year’s deficit would equal 3.0 percent of the nation’s economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP)—close to the average percentage of GDP seen during the past 40 years.

So unless you think we’ve been in a Deficit Emergency for the past 40 years, we’re not going to be in one this year or next.

But that’s not what caught everybody’s attention. Instead of looking to the CBO’s summary for the story, the media (led by the right-wing media) looked to Appendix C “Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Updated Estimates”. Because, you know, appendices of government reports are always so fascinating, especially the third appendix.

But even if you only read the appendices, you still have some choice about what the story is. Appendix B, for example, says:

CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate that the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA will markedly increase the number of nonelderly people who have health insurance—by about 13 million in 2014, 20 million in 2015, and 25 million in each of the subsequent years through 2024 (see Table B-2).

So despite all the scary (and debunked) headlines about cancelled policies and increased premiums, the ACA will make substantial progress on its main goal: Millions more people will have health insurance.

But the cost of that coverage will explode the deficit, right? Well, this report reiterated a previous conclusion:

Considering all of the coverage provisions and the other provisions together, CBO and JCT estimated in July 2012 (the most recent comprehensive estimates) that the total effect of the ACA would be to reduce federal deficits.

But maybe you’re worried about the “insurance company bailout” Republicans have been denouncing, which the rest of the world calls “risk corridors”. If so, you’d focus on this part of Appendix B:

CBO now projects that, over the 2015–2024 period, risk corridor payments from the federal government to health insurers will total $8 billion and the corresponding collections from insurers will amount to $16 billion, yielding net savings for the federal government of $8 billion.

So the “bailout” is a re-insurance plan that the government expects to make an $8 billion profit on.

But anyway, what does Appendix C say?

CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor … The reduction in CBO’s projections of hours worked represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million in 2017, rising to about 2.5 million in 2024.

It’s not hard for me to imagine why this might happen: My wife is a (currently healthy) over-55 two-time cancer survivor, and prior to ObamaCare she couldn’t possibly have gotten insurance on the individual market at any reasonable rate. She happens to like her job, but many people in similar situations might decide to retire early (now that they have that option) rather than hang on until Medicare covers them. Similarly, my college roommate has been frozen into his job for the last couple decades, because his son was born with major medical problems that a new employer’s insurance company might write off as a pre-existing condition. Other people might prefer to work part-time, but have been hanging on to full-time jobs for fear of losing their health coverage. Or maybe extended Medicaid or S-CHIP coverage or an ObamaCare subsidy could shift the balance in a struggling household towards having one parent stay home with the kids.

That’s the kind of thing the CBO is talking about: “workers … choose to supply less labor”. It’s a good kind of thing.

So naturally it got covered like this by the conservative media:

Fox News: ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.5 million US jobs, report says

Washington Times: ObamaCare will push 2 million workers out of labor market: CBO

National Review: The CBO just nuked ObamaCare

And not much differently by the mainstream media:

The Hill: O-Care will cost 2.5 million workers by 2024

UPI: ObamaCare to cost 2.3 million jobs over ten years

And even a 180-degree false CNBC headline: CBO says ObamaCare will add to deficit, create reluctant work force — later corrected to allow that ObamaCare “may not add to federal deficit” rather than the accurate “the total effect of the ACA would be to reduce federal deficits”.

CBO director Paul Elmendorf testified before Congress Wednesday morning, and set the record straight. The CBO believes that ObamaCare will increase demand for labor over the next few years, creating jobs rather than killing them.

When reporters began to understand that they’d been scammed into repeating Republican talking points, many of them blamed the Obama administration. National Journal‘s headline: “The White House is Still Terrible at Explaining ObamaCare“. You see, it’s not up to reporters to check facts and inform their readers rather than mislead them. How can they be expected to print the truth when no one spoon-feeds the story to them properly? And why didn’t the White House (which doesn’t control the CBO) anticipate the report, anticipate that Appendix C would be the story, and anticipate that Republicans would twist its statements into pretzels? Shouldn’t they have been prepared for this?

That’s your liberal media in action.

February 10, 2014 – 8:10 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week I tackle the Common Core standards, which several people have been asking about. I knew I had my work cut out for me last week when I heard Chris Hayes say that he didn’t know what to think about them. When was the last time Chris Hayes didn’t know what to think? I’ve always imagined that if you woke Chris up at 3 a.m. and picked a subject out of the encyclopedia at random, he’d say, “Funny you should ask about that.”

The gist of my conclusion is that the standards are fine, the tests are fine, but what people want to do with the test results is crazy. Along the way I’m going to end up telling you about my own bizarre educational history, my sister’s experiences as a public school teacher, and a bunch of other stuff that makes the article run way too long. (I’m blowing away my usual word limit this week.)

I’m also writing an article about that CBO report that the media mangled into saying that ObamaCare will kill jobs. Other people have covered it, but I think they’ve missed the real story: That’s not even what the report was about. The CBO thought it was explaining why the deficit is falling. The media had to ignore the report’s main subject and several other possible stories before latching onto ObamaCare-kills-jobs, which the report didn’t even say. Then after it became clear that they had misreported the story, some reporters blamed the administration for not having a better explanation ready in case they made a story out of a misrepresentation of Appendix C.

Finally, in the weekly summary: Woody Allen responded, Bill Nye debated at the Creationist Museum (and lived to tell the tale), Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death reminded people that heroin is a problem, the NFL is going to have an openly gay player next season, and Congressman Sarbanes has introduced a practical bill for lessening the influence of big money on our politicians.

The CBO article should be out soon. I can’t estimate how long it will take me to put finishing touches on the Common Core article and then do the weekly summary.

February 10, 2014 – 7:27 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Unstable Equilibrium

There is nothing more destructive than a ruling class that simultaneously has too much power and is genuinely convinced it’s being persecuted. That is the situation we have now. And history has shown that’s a very unstable equilibrium indeed.

— Chris Hayes, All In 1-30-2014

This week’s featured posts: “Occupying the State of the Union” and “Subtext in the State of the Union (and its responses)“

This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union

I think this is the first time I’ve ever done two articles on the same news event in the same week. But I had two very points to make: “Occupying the State of the Union” is about how the Occupy message is changing political common sense, just like Occupy’s theorists said it would. “Subtext …” is a combination of debunking nonsense and observing what the different parties spin choices says about where they think they are.

and still Bridgegate

The most complete reporting on this story comes from MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki, on his weekend program Up. The major developments this week are:

  • Today is the deadline for complying with the legislature’s subpoenas. Expect new developments soon.
  • A lawyer for David Wildstein (the Christie appointee at the Port Authority who replied “Got it” to the “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email) claims in a letter that Christie knew about the lane closures while they were still happening. “Mr. Wildstein contest contests the accuracy of various statements that the Governor made about him, and can prove the inaccuracy of some.” Christie and his defenders denied this and hit back hard.
  • Rather than produce the documents the legislature has subpoenaed, Bill Stepien (Christie’s re-election campaign manager), is challenging the subpoena on Fifth Amendment (self-incrimination) grounds.
  • Another Christie staffer resigned Friday.
  • Bookending the Hoboken mayor’s claim that her city was short-changed on federal Sandy-reconstruction money for political reasons, $6 million turns out to have gone to a senior-citizen center in a town largely unaffected by Sandy, whose Democratic mayor endorsed Christie.

On Saturday’s program, Kornacki described how the Christie administration has maneuvered to circumvent transparency laws for the Sandy money. He discussed the case with various Jersey insiders, who agreed on this interesting point: You hire one kind of lawyer to fix political problems, and another kind to keep you out of jail. Christie’s people are picking the second kind.

and the Wendy Davis dog whistle

An article in the Dallas Morning News poked a few holes in the Wendy Davis campaign biography, which gender scholar Peggy Drexler sums up like this for CNN:

Turns out the Texas senator and gubernatorial hopeful had some help paying for her Harvard Law School education (though she never said she didn’t). Turns out, too, that Davis’ two children spent most of their time back in Texas while Davis got that education (though she never said they hadn’t). She claimed she was 19 when she divorced, but the truth appears to be that she was separated at 19 and divorced at 21 (busted!).

For some reason, this has evoked massive hostility from right-wing pundits, and really nasty comments from readers of the online news articles. Erick Erickson’s tweets (“So Abortion Barbie had a Sugar Daddy Ken”) were so obnoxious that Fox News’ Greta Sustern called him out on her blog (and was herself savaged in the comments).

You know what this reminds me of? The flap over Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry (which she can’t document, but never campaigned on). At the low point in the controversy, Brown staffers were making war whoops and doing tomahawk chops to mock her.

So: Fairly minor dispute over biographic details becomes major campaign issue for a female candidate, evoking (at least from some quarters) real hostility. It’s hard for me to imagine anything of similar size being a significant problem for a male candidate.

I’m starting to think there’s a Lying Bitch stereotype that opponents of female candidates can dog-whistle up with just about any claim of deception. Not sure how this will play out in Texas, but in Massachusetts the men went too far and caused a backlash. If you raise too much of a ruckus, the whole point of dog-whistling gets lost.

but I’d like to call your attention to Lesterland

The $2 e-book and the TED talk. Lawrence Lessig describes how the U.S. is run by a group of people (“the relevant funders”) with about as many members as there are people named “Lester”.

and you also might be interested in …

Dylan Farrow’s account of being molested by Woody Allen, published in protest of the lifetime achievement award Allen received at the recent Golden Globes, is a powerful piece of writing. It raises a number of issues: the difficulty of proving a case when your star witness is a child; the easy relationship the law has with wealthy, famous people; the difference between the law’s presumption of innocence and the moral judgments we make as individuals; and finally the extent to which great art can stand apart from the flawed (or perhaps even villainous) people who make it.

Last week I talked about multi-millionaire Tom Perkins and his remarkable comparison between Occupy-style criticism of the 1% and Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany. Perkins got roundly denounced, and eventually realized that bringing up the Nazis was over the top. But he still hasn’t grasped the full absurdity of considering America’s mega-rich as a persecuted class. (If I could ask Perkins one question, it would be: “What kind of worship do you think you deserve?”)

Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal (which started this controversy by publishing Perkins’ letter) weighed in on Perkins’ side: He should have left the Jews out of it, but the persecution of “the successful one percent” is real. (The idea that Americans might reject a society where only one percent can be “successful” seems lost on them.) (Along the way, they repeated the long-discredited claim that “President Obama’s IRS targeted conservative political groups”.)

Two liberal views are worth bringing into this discussion: First, Josh Marshall’s:

we miss the point if we see this in isolation or just the rant of one out-of-touch douchebag. It is pervasive. The disconnect between perception and reality, among such a powerful segment of the population, is in itself dangerous.

and Chris Hayes’ (in a segment that starts around the 28-minute mark of Thursday’s All In):

I wrote an entire book about the psychology and the psycho-pathologies of the American elite, and if there’s one thing I’ve taken away, it is that there is nothing more destructive than a ruling class that simultaneously has too much power and is genuinely convinced it’s being persecuted. That is the situation we have now. And history has shown that’s a very unstable equilibrium indeed.

Speaking of the persecuted 1%: As Sean Hannity talks about leaving liberal New York, Jon Stewart gets the cast of Jersey Boys to beg him to stay.

Climate denial doesn’t just happen in this country. Here’s an account from New Zealand that reveals all the same underhanded tactics.

and let’s close with Pete Seeger

As we say good-bye to Pete Seeger, this is how he might say good-bye to us: “Well may the world go, when I am far away.”

February 3, 2014 – 12:00 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment