Word and deed

No Sift next week. Next new articles: August 26.

It is in our deeds and not our words that our religion must be read.

— Thomas Jefferson

This week everybody was talking about the Washington Post

The Graham family, which has owned the paper since God-knows-when and was in charge when the Post overthrew Nixon single-handedly, sold out to Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos.

Maybe Bezos has some amazing plan to bring the Post into the 21st century, or maybe newspapers are like baseball teams used to be — toys for rich guys. But guess what? For once I agree with Ross Douthat: When the internet took off, the Post had a chance to become the national site for politics. Politico was built by ex-WaPo people, who could have built it inside WaPo, if management had more vision.

and President Obama finally addressed the NSA issue, sort of

Long story made short: If you think the NSA collecting everyone’s data is basically a good idea, but you worry about rogue agents misusing it, what Obama laid out should reassure you a little. If you think the government just shouldn’t be collecting this much information in the first place, he conceded nothing. “It’s not enough for me, as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well.”

and the Senate is talking about filibuster reform again

Last month a deal to approve several of President Obama’s appointees to posts in his administration avoided a showdown over the filibuster. Now the issue is the three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most significant of the nation’s appellate courts.

The court currently has four judges appointed by Republican presidents and four appointed by Democrats, with the seniority of the Republican judges tilting the balance towards conservatives. The issue resembles what Senate Republicans were doing when they pledged to filibuster any appointee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Board: Traditionally, an appointment was filibustered only for objections to the particular nominee, but Republicans have decided that the D.C. court is over-staffed and intend to filibuster any nominee to the three empty seats. (No one suggested the court was over-staffed when Bush was president.)

Republicans have proposed a bill to cut the number of judges on the court from 11 to 8, and thus eliminate the vacancies. That’s a completely legitimate use of congressional power, but they don’t have the votes to pass it. So they’re using the filibuster to achieve what they can’t achieve through the democratic process.

Harry Reid is threatening to change the rules on the filibuster if the Republicans don’t back down. They yielded last month. You’d think they wouldn’t restart the confrontation if they didn’t have a different strategy this time, but who knows?

and the Republicans in Congress went home to consult their base

Last week I speculated that divisions in the Republican House caucus might make it impossible to pass the appropriation bills necessary to keep the government running into FY2014, which starts October 1. This week Republican congresspeople have been home for the August recess and talking to their constituents.

Groups like FreedomWorks are trying to rally the base around far-right strategies like shutting down the government unless Democrats agree to defund Obamacare. To an extent, that’s working, but other citizens are showing up at town hall meetings as well. This North Carolinian puts Rep. Patrick McHenry on the spot about voting to repeal a plan that will make it possible for him to get healthcare despite his pre-existing conditions — and the crowd cheers him.

Other conservative congressfolks are being reminded just out wacky their base is … and demonstrating how afraid they are to defend reality from the lunatic fringe.

In this video, Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma has to deal with a Birther who wants to talk about “Obama’s identification fraud”, i.e., he’s not really an American. Mullin can’t just say “no, ma’am” like John McCain did in 2008, because that would require backbone. So he tries to redirect the conversation onto tactics, saying “We lost that argument November 6” while making sure that his constituents know “I’m not defending this guy” and “I believe what you’re saying.” (Congressman Mullin’s people later claimed he “misspoke” in saying that he agreed with Birtherism, as if “I believe what you’re saying” were a tricky phrase he didn’t know how to use properly.)

Same guy: He’s sure he saw food stamp fraud, because a couple using them were in good shape and had nice work-out clothes. I’m not sure what Mullin thinks happens when you lose your job. Nobody re-possesses your closet, and it can take a while to get depressed enough to let yourself slide out of shape. But your income may fall into food-stamp territory anyway.

And still others are actively pushing the wackiness. Rep. Steve King told a family-values conference:

when you profess the things that we believe in, and you’re a 501(c)3 and you’re afraid of the IRS, just go ahead and defy the IRS on that.

Notice: The IRS doesn’t stop anybody from professing the things they believe in, just from financing that professing with tax-free donations. So King isn’t invoking a “higher law”, he’s invoking a higher tax code. Our text this morning is from the book of Foundations, chapter 3, beginning with the 14th verse: “And then he said unto them …”

and we’re discovering that 2014 isn’t going to be a replay of 2010

Ever since November, people of all partisan loyalties have been invoking this analogy: 2012 was like 2008 (Obama wins by inspiring a large turnout of minorities and young people), so 2014 will be like 2010 (an older, whiter electorate will be fed up with liberal over-reach and vote in a bunch of Republicans).

The 2010 replay was supposed to start with a remarkable coincidence: Just as Massachusetts needed a special Senate election to replace Ted Kennedy in 2009, it needed another one to replace John Kerry in 2013. But Gabriel Gomez couldn’t pull off another Scott Brown upset, so the Democrats held Kerry’s seat.

And the August congressional recess was beginning of the Tea Party wave in 2009, as organized chaos broke out in the townhall meetings of Democrats all over the country. This year, though, it’s the Republican townhalls that seem more chaotic. And the “liberal overreach” story of 2010 has become the “conservative obstruction” story of 2014.

That’s not to say that the Republicans won’t pick up seats in 2014; the second mid-term is typically difficult for a two-term administration. But if that happens, it will be via a different story than the Tea Party tidal wave of 2010.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing the conversation on race

with “Acting white isn’t really a racial issue“. In some settings, black students who succeed in school are accused (mainly by other black students) of “acting white”. It turns out that something similar happens among working-class white students, where it doesn’t have a racial name.

The Daily Show is also continuing the conversation on race, with mixed results.

I can’t tell if this is fake outrage or if conservatives are really this clueless, but they’re pushing the story of three black 15-year-olds beating up a 13-year-old white as proving the “hypocrisy” of the black activists who organized protests about the Trayvon Martin case. Media Matters reports:

Since Wednesday, nearly half a dozen Fox programs have dedicated airtime to questioning why civil right leaders, specifically Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, have yet to make public statements on the case. … Sean Hannity complained “the people that commented so often on the Trayvon Martin case, I haven’t heard a word out of them about this video.” His guest Michelle Malkin agreed.

As if the whole point of the Martin case was just white-on-black crime. Unlike in Martin’s shooting, in this case the authorities immediately took the crime seriously and the perpetrators have been arrested — so the system is working fine and there’s no need for public protests from Jackson and Sharpton or anyone else. MM elaborates:

In the month since the attack, no one has excused the actions of the attackers, no one has suggested the victim deserved a beating, no one has rooted through social media accounts in an attempt to blame the victim, and no one suggested that he had it coming because of his choice of clothing. Conservatives engaged in all of these actions during the 46 days between the killing of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of George Zimmerman.

and you also might be interested in …

Another example proving that you can’t solve a problem when you don’t admit it exists: Republicans deny they have a sexism problem and say the War on Women is just a liberal slander. So why shouldn’t a Republican PAC raise money with a “Slap Hillary” game? Slapping a woman to shut her up … why should that remind anybody of anything creepy?

Who really suffers from religious discrimination in the military? Humanists.

A follow-up to my July “Keeping the Con in Conservatism” post: In the first half of 2013, Michele Bachmann’s PAC spent a quarter million dollars on legal fees, and $400 supporting candidates.

You know who’s worried about global warming? Insurance companies. They’re also not too keen on insuring schools that arm their teachers.

It makes great rhetoric to say that climate change is a big socialist conspiracy or that more guns make us all safer, but when you have to put your money on the line, you end up having to deal with reality.

This is incredibly cool: Drinking water out of thin air.

and let’s end with something fun

August 12, 2013 – 1:39 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

“Acting White” isn’t really a racial issue

If you want to blame a downtrodden group for their own disadvantages, here’s a handy trick: Take a broad social problem, see how it intersects with that group, and then talk about that intersection as if it were a unique problem located in that group.

Tricks like this are easier to spot in retrospect. So, for example, years ago when the gay-rights discussion was about whether public schools should allow gay teachers — already in 2004 that issue was an embarrassment to Jim DeMint and has since been removed even from far-right documents like the South Carolina Republican Platform — we used to hear a lot about gay teachers having sex with their students, as if this were some special gay problem totally unrelated to straight teachers having sex with their students. (Something similar is still going on in the Catholic priest scandal; rather than talk about the larger problem of the clergy sexual abuse that occurs in all denominations and victimizes both genders, some people want the issue to be about gay priests.)

Muslim terrorism and Islamic extremism are good present-day examples, because they’re usually discussed as if they had no similarity to Christian terrorism or extremism.

This trick is easy to fall for. I used to think that every incompetent black or female I ran into was an indictment of affirmative action, until somebody asked me: “How many incompetent white men do you know?”

Never mind.

Anyway, we’re supposedly having a national conversation on race. So far, the conservative half of that has largely been an indictment of black culture: Since racism is mythical and the ladder to success climbed by white ethnic groups — Irish, Italians, Poles — is still there, all blacks would have to do is clean up their act, get educated, and work hard. They’d all be CEOs in no time.

What supposedly stops this from happening is the unique inferiority of black culture. They take drugs, commit crimes, have illegitimate children — nobody forces them to do this stuff, Bill O’Reilly reminds us, “That’s a personal decision.”

And they’re actively hostile to education. “young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs”. Bill came back to that point in a later broadcast:

Even if there were plenty of jobs, most employers are not going to hire people who can’t read well and speak proper English. Right now the unemployment rate among black males age 16 to 19, 57 percent; 57 percent. It’s 25 percent for white males that age. Overall, black unemployment, 14 percent; white unemployment, 6.6 percent. The reason, in many poor neighborhoods there’s chaos, violence and little discipline in the public schools. Kids aren’t learning.

CNN’s Don Lemon said O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough” and told his fellow blacks:

Want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they’re acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English.

Even President Obama has hit that theme, most notably in the 2004 Democratic Convention speech that launched him onto the national stage:

children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

Telling kids who succeed in school that they’re “acting white” — for an educated white audience, that’s just beyond the pale. It’s a conscious rebellion against knowledge. What more proof do you need that black culture is horribly sick?

You know where else you see that phenomenon? Working class whites. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen writes both about her own white-working-class childhood and her adult experience as a counselor to working class white students.

She describes school as an extension of professional-class culture. Kids who grow up in the professional class live at home with the same communication patterns they’ll meet at school, while kids growing up in the working class have to learn special ways to act and talk in the classroom. (Simple example: Adults quizzing kids by asking questions they already know the answer to. It’s an obvious school thing, and professional-class parents do it all the time, beginning at a very early age. “What’s the cow say?” When parents question kids in a working-class household, it’s more like, “Who knocked that glass of water over?” So when those kids arrive at school and the teacher starts asking them questions, their instinctive reaction is that they’re being accused of something. And if you can’t see where a line of questioning is going, the safest thing is just to dummy up.)

Once working-class kids get past the basic foreignness of the school environment, they are taught that the way they speak at home is wrong. (I grew up putting an r-sound into the name of our nation’s capital — Worshington — and taking one out of the second month — Febuary. School taught me that was wrong.) Jensen has no problem with teaching Standard English, but …

How kids should be taught these skills is my concern. Is it really necessary to learn that everything a child knew before school about language is nothing more than bad English and ignorance?

Little by little, what you do at school starts to seem disloyal to your home life, because you’re being taught to look down on where you come from. It gets worse in middle school, where even professional-class kids have issues with peer pressure versus submission to authority. In the early grades, the clash was mainly between the influence of the parents and the influence of the teacher. But middle school is likely to be a larger school of mixed social classes. In addition to the teachers wanting to civilize you, you have to deal with the born-civilized professional-class kids and the teachers’ implicit why-can’t-you-be-more-like-them. Result? a culture of resistance that punishes collaborators.

Working class kids who are into academics get shunned and teased by other kids because they care about impressing their teachers. … My friends and I came to excel at rebelling — not as solitary rebels, like actor James Dean in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, but as a community of resistance to the authority of school.

This is a white author talking about white kids. She tells a sad story about quitting choir — even though she loved it — because she was too embarrassed to be up on stage with all the goody-goody professional-class kids in front of her working-class friends. (Jensen herself eventually got a Ph.D., but not until after a long strange trip that had little to do with her early schooling.)

So in short, I’m not claiming that “acting white” isn’t a problem, or that it doesn’t get in the way of black kids making a better life for themselves. I’m just saying it’s not a racial problem. It’s a thing that happens when the culture of school is alien to the culture of a neighborhood, and it happens to whites as well as blacks.

Because of their place in society, blacks are more likely to be in the path of this storm than whites, just as more blacks than whites were left behind in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. But just as we don’t have a “black hurricane problem”, we don’t have a black resistance-to-education problem.

August 12, 2013 – 8:44 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The schedule is a little unpredictable today because I’m squeezing in a doctor’s appointment before going on vacation tomorrow. I think the Sift will also be shorter than average this week, because I’ve been dumping time into a different project.

This week’s featured article “Acting white isn’t really a racial issue” just needs a final read-through, so it should come out shortly. I’ll be using Barbara Jensen’s observations of working-class white kids to show that the “acting white” phenomenon among black kids in school (i.e., accusing successful students of being disloyal to the group) isn’t a unique flaw of black culture.

The weekly summary will come out after my doctor’s appointment, so the timing depends on how long I spend in the waiting room. (You know how unpredictable that is.) It will discuss the sale of the Washington Post, a new showdown in the Senate over the filibuster, President Obama’s NSA proposals, all the strange goings-on as Republicans meet their base during the August recess, why 2014 doesn’t look like a replay of 2010, and a few other things. I haven’t picked a lead quote or a title yet.

No Sift next week. See you on the 26th.

August 12, 2013 – 7:51 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Augury

Jurisdictions covered by the preclearance requirement continued to submit, in large numbers, proposed changes to voting laws that the Attorney General declined to ap­prove, auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy elimi­nated.
— Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissenting opinion in Shelby County v. Holder
June 25, 2013

I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
interview with Associated Press
July 24, 2013

This week the conversation about race continued

CNN’s Don Lemon did a “No Talking Points” segment whose final bottom-of-the-screen admonitions was “Black people. Clean up your act!” In response, hip-hop activist Jay Smooth schooled him:

There are two types of advice that people usually give. There’s advice that you give to try and help someone with their problems, and then there’s advice that you give to help yourself feel better about not knowing how to help them with their problems. And the difference is all in the context.

The specifics of Lemon’s eat-your-vegetables guidance is unobjectionable, from “Pull up your pants” to “Just because you can have a baby, it doesn’t mean you should.” But in the context of a black man speaking to CNN’s mostly white audience at a time when white people are blaming black culture for Trayvon Martin’s death and refusing delivery on any talk of systemic racism, Jay Smooth is right: “His advice was f**king terrible.”

No doubt black culture could improve, just as white culture could improve. But white people are looking for ways to ignore or wash their hands of the systemic racism in the justice system. Don Lemon gave them one.

The comment thread on last week’s Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here is worth a look.

Best thing I ran into this week: Peggy McIntosh’s TED talk “How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion“. Terrible title, but an excellent message, not just about recognizing white privilege, but moving forward from there without getting trapped in liberal guilt.

And lots of people were talking about the increasing chaos in Congress

Another one of the basic, didn’t-used-to-be-controversial appropriations bills failed this week, and Congress took its summer recess with no plan for getting back on track. Increasingly it’s looking like the House might shut down the government in October, not because that’s part of somebody’s hardline negotiating strategy, but because the Republican majority is too fractured to pass anything. I flesh out that scenario in Chaos in Congress.

and the Ariel Castro sentence

The man who kidnapped three Cleveland women and kept them as sex slaves for years got life without parole plus a thousand years. Some radioactive waste doesn’t have to be held that long.

But we should be keeping tabs on voting rights

which I do this week in Voting Rights one month after Shelby.

and you also might be interested in …

This guy is likely to be the Republican candidate for Congress in my district. ObamaCare “is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.” Sometimes I think the whole point of Tea Party rhetoric is to screw discourse up so badly that there’s no chance of reasoning together about our common problems.

The issue isn’t even whether corporations have freedom of religion. It’s whether their God is bigger than your God.

Every time it starts to sound like the NSA’s spying might be adequately controlled, something else comes out.

If it seems like the Republican Party is more anti-environment than it used to be, that’s because it is. Four former Republican EPA chiefs just called for action on climate change. If any Republican leaders in Congress or potential Republican presidential candidates have signed on to their program, I haven’t heard about it.

Google’s support for anti-science Senator James Inhofe is hurting their image:

The WSJ and New York Sun worry that women want Janet Yellin to become Fed chair just because she’s a woman.

Jonathan Chait points out what ought to be obvious: Women are used to being told that men would like to appoint women to powerful positions, but can’t find any who are qualified. (Finding that elusive qualified female was why Mitt Romney needed his “binders full of women“.) But now that the obvious and most qualified person is a woman, men seem to be saying “Not so fast.” That’s the source of the conflict, not “liberal diversity police”.

Here‘s Allison Lundergan Grimes’ announcement of her Kentucky senate campaign. Tough, charming, young, female, with real Kentucky roots — I think I’d be scared if I were Mitch McConnell and had to defend my role in creating the logjam in Washington. Recent polls show a tight race, if Mitch can make it past the Tea Party in his primary.

Lauren Green’s interview with author Reza Aslan — where she seemed dumbfounded by the notion that a scholar who practices Islam might write a book about Jesus — has been touted as possibly “the single most cringe-worthy, embarrassing interview” in the history of Fox News. (But Salon points out that there’s a lot of competition for that honor.)

Even if Aslan were writing as a Muslim rather than as a scholar, a Muslim writing about Jesus is no more suspicious than a Christian writing about Moses. Muslims revere Jesus as a forerunner of Mohammad — much as Christians revere Moses, the central figure of Judaism.

To me, this is all about projection. Right-wing Christians are quick to assume that a Muslim writing about Jesus must be doing a hit piece, because they have done so many hit pieces on Mohammad since 9-11.

With all the hoopla, you’d think they were revealing the 12th Imam, not the 12th Doctor Who.

The problem with laws that allow journalists not to reveal their sources is that “journalist” has no obvious definition.

Columbia Journalism Review does a retrospective on media coverage of the IRS scandal-that-wasn’t.

That big peak on the left is all the it-looks-really-bad speculation early in the story, and that flat-lining to the right is the non-coverage as the facts came out and showed that nothing really bad actually happened. Maddowblog’s Steve Benen sums up:

It’s tempting to chalk this up to human nature — there’s a major event, and everyone pays attention, but as time passes, our attention wanes and we lose interest. It happens all the time, and it’s understandable.

I’d argue, however, that what happened with the IRS story is something slightly different. … Outlets didn’t move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened — things that made the story itself appear baseless. In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false.

Let’s end with something fun: bears pole-dancing

Those motion-sensitive cameras out in the woods are recording some amusing things.

August 5, 2013 – 1:10 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Chaos in Congress

Since the Republicans regained a majority in the House in 2010, we’ve gotten used to seeing everything come down to the last minute. Congress and the White House can’t agree on the basic bills that have to pass to keep the government running — to put Social Security checks in the mail and keep the national parks open — so again and again high-stakes negotiations between Speaker Boehner and President Obama have been necessary to craft a last-minute compromise that nobody likes. That was the story of the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and so on.

So talk about another showdown when the new fiscal year starts in October may seem like same-old same-old: Everyone will posture, doomsday clocks will tick towards zero, and chaos will loom, but eventually Obama and Boehner will go into a room and come out with something that keeps the worst from happening. Both sides will rail about how unacceptable this agreement is, but ultimately majorities in Congress will accept it and life will go on.

This time might be different. Boehner will likely end up playing Chicken again, but this time it’s not clear he even has brakes or a steering wheel. It’s not his driving I question, it’s his vehicle.

Increasingly, the House Republican majority is losing the cohesion necessary to be part of the governing structure. Congressional Republicans can come together to block what President Obama wants, but they can’t come together on a program of their own. In September, Speaker Boehner will likely go into that room with no position to negotiate from and no ability to pass a compromise without relying mainly on Democratic votes — and the prospect of losing his speakership if he does.

To understand what’s happening, you need to appreciate things on two levels: the mechanics of the appropriations process (where things are starting to fall apart) and the underlying illusions in the minds of the conservative rank-and-file.

Legislative failure I: the farm bill. In the last few months we’ve seen some spectacular legislative failures in the House. First when the farm bill failed in June. The farm bill is a compromise that goes back to the 70s: Democrats get money for food stamps and Republicans get money for farm subsidies. Poor people going hungry and small farmers losing their land are two images that raise a lot of public sympathy, so for decades neither party has wanted to scuttle the deal.

Until June. The Senate passed a traditional compromise farm bill (with some moderate cuts on both sides) 66-27. But the House bill included $20 billion in cuts to Food Stamps over ten years — too much for Democrats but not enough for the most conservative Republicans. So it lost 234-195. Subsequently, the House passed a farm-subsidies-only bill and is drafting a separate bill with $40 billion in Food Stamp cuts. The usual practice would be for a joint House/Senate conference committee to iron out differences in their respective bills, but so far the House is refusing to appoint its conferees.

At the moment, nobody sees a clear path to a bill that can be passed by both houses and signed by the president before all authority for food stamps and farm subsidies vanishes on October 1.

Legislative failure II: T/HUD. This week both houses went home for the summer recess after failing even to vote on the appropriations bill that funds the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.

T/HUD is another one of those bipartisan bills that — after some tussle and a few close votes on amendments — usually passes by wide margins, because it includes some of the most visible, most popular spending the government does. It rebuilds bridges, widens highways, and opens new parks.

The Senate could have passed a bill had one come to a vote, but Mitch McConnell led yet another filibuster. In the House, the T/HUD bill was pulled from the calendar when the leadership realized they couldn’t pass it.

Why? Because the House Republican version of T/HUD slashes a lot of popular local programs, and not even Republicans are prepared to face the voters having cut stuff their districts want and need. So why put those cuts in the bill to begin with? Well, that’s where the story gets interesting. TPM’s Brian Beutler explains:

In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But this year the House passed the Ryan budget and the Senate passed something much closer to what we’ve been doing. Senate Republicans have blocked the Senate from appointing conferees to work out the differences.

OK, so what? Well, a budget is just a list of numbers; it doesn’t specify exactly what does and doesn’t get paid for. (It’s like when a husband and wife agree to reduce their annual food budget, but leave for later whether they’re going to cut back on steak or quiche.) The nitty-gritty happens in the appropriations process, in bills like T/HUD and the farm bill.

Because the budget process failed, the House is proceeding with appropriations under the Ryan budget. This is the first time anybody has tried to spell out Ryan’s cuts. Beutler narrates:

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218 [votes in the House, i.e., a majority].

That’s not just a problem with T/HUD. It’s a problem for all the appropriations bills that need to pass by October 1. The Ryan budget never worked, except as a promised land that the evil Obama and nasty Senate Democrats kept Republicans from reaching. But now they’ve blundered into a position where they have to produce photos of their promised land.

And their voters are not going to understand why they can’t do it.

ObamaCare and Immigration. If it’s that hard to keep funding popular programs that specifically help your district, what about controversial stuff like ObamaCare and immigration reform?

There’s no ticking clock on immigration reform, so needless to say the House hasn’t gone anywhere with the bill that passed the Senate with 68 votes. Instead of one bill that embraces compromises, Eric Cantor told Chris Wallace:

We will have a vote on a series of bills at some point, Chris. It will deal with a variety of issues.

In other words, the farm bill is the model. The House will divide the Senate bill up, pass the parts that please conservatives and not pass the parts that please liberals. The bills they pass will all die in the Senate, where they need some Democratic votes.

But at least that won’t shut the government down, it will just kick the can to a future Congress. On ObamaCare, the Tea Party folks in Congress are pushing an Alamo-like stand, where Republicans will shut down the government until Democrats agree to defund implementation. Karl Rove and Tom Coburn think this is madness, but it’s a crowd-pleaser if you’re only worried about winning a Republican primary.

Political fantasy meets reality. Poll after poll shows the same thing: Ask Americans if they want the government to spend less, and they say yes. Ask them specifically whether the government should spend less on the things the government spends almost all its money on — healthcare, Social Security, defense, homeland security, roads, schools, air traffic control, food safety, disease control, disaster relief, … — and they say no.

The difference is fantasy spending: Bridges to Nowhere, foreign aid to countries that hate us, welfare fraud, and a bunch of other “government waste” that serves no legitimate purpose and could be slashed to zero without hurting anybody. Ask people — especially conservatives — how much of the federal budget is spent on such stuff, and you’ll hear ridiculous answers like half or more, rather than the actual drop-in-a-huge-bucket.

So the ideal political position to run on (if your opponent will let you get away with it) is that you’re going to make vast unspecified budget cuts that won’t actually hurt anybody. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense people will believe — until you have to make good on the details.

Conservative politicians and media personalities have been feeding this fantasy in the rank-and-file for decades, and now they can’t control it. Republicans know that it is death to go into a primary battle with a Tea Party challenger and try to make conservative voters deal with reality. But now the leaders themselves have to deal with reality as legislators, and their primary voters are watching.

What to do?

August 5, 2013 – 10:34 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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Voting Rights one month after Shelby

A little over a month ago, the Supreme Court threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. That was the part that forced the former Jim Crow states to clear with the federal government any changes in voting rules. Now that those states were off the federal leash, no one knew exactly what would happen next. But there were several possibilities:

The Jim Crow states could have proved Chief Justice Roberts right. “Nearly fifty years [after the original Voting Rights Act was passed],” the Chief Justice wrote, “things have changed dramatically.” In this scenario it would become clear that the South no longer needed federal oversight. States would adjust their voting practices occasionally as circumstances demanded, but not renew the effort to disenfranchise nonwhites.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ginsburg disagreed.

Jurisdictions covered by the preclearance requirement continued to submit, in large numbers, proposed changes to voting laws that the Attorney General declined to ap­prove, auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy elimi­nated.

Score one for Ginsburg. As soon as the VRA decision rolled out of the printers, states started whittling away at voting rights. The current champion is North Carolina, which on July 25 passed an omnibus voter suppression law that the governor has pledged to sign soon, despite seeming to know little about it. Salon sums up:

They have, in essence, included in this bill every conceivable voter suppression tactic that has ever been dreamed up over the past decade by the Republican Party — and then some.

Raleigh’s WRAL has a detailed list, but every way you can imagine to restrict voting (short of just suspending elections entirely) is there: photo ID (not accepting student IDs, because students trend Democratic), less early voting, shorter polling hours, no provisional ballots, no same-day registration, restrictions on registration drives …

As in other Republican-dominated states that have passed such measures (but usually piecemeal), there is no evidence at all of voter impersonation — the only kind of fraud photo IDs hinder — in North Carolina. (Last month I described how an extensive South Carolina investigation of in-person voter fraud failed to find any.) NC has some history of absentee-ballot fraud, which this law does not address. (Why discourage absentee voting when it trends Republican?)

Photo-ID requirements essentially target voters who don’t drive — mainly the poor, the disabled, and big-city singles, all of whom trend Democratic. Democracy North Carolina estimates that blacks are 23% of the state’s registered voters, but 34% of the registered voters without acceptable photo IDs. (Slicing those numbers a different way: 3.8% of registered white voters lack an ID, while 7.4% of registered blacks do.)

Reduced early voting and short polling hours target people who have a hard time getting off work or making transportation connections — mainly the working poor and (again) non-drivers. Black voters make up 29% of early voters and 34% of those who register on election day.

Congress could update Section 4 of the VRA to meet the Court’s guidelines. This option was always going to be tricky, because Justice Roberts didn’t really say what would make him happy. (That was my main complaint in This Court Sucks.) But still, the 2006 re-authorization of the VRA passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33, and a lot of those people are still around. So you’d think Congress would be motivated to make the law work again.

No luck there either. The House subcommittee holding hearings on the VRA is chaired by Trent Franks, who was one of the 33 voting against renewing the VRA in 2006. The witnesses the subcommittee’s Republican majority called had a unified message: Don’t bother; there’s no problem that needs fixing.

When you consider that the states covered by Section 4 are overwhelmingly represented by Republicans (strange coincidence there, don’t you think?) and Republicans control the House, the prospects for a reasonable revision seem remote.

The Justice Department could get a federal court to re-instate preclearance on specific states for specific reasons. OK, Section 4 is most likely gone for good, so Section 5 (preclearance) doesn’t function automatically. But there’s still Section 3c, containing what for some reason is called the “pocket trigger”. Translating from the legalese: If the Attorney General wins a voting-rights case in federal court against some state, the court can do more than just reverse whatever discriminatory practice the state had instituted; it can also “retain jurisdiction” over that state’s voting laws “for such period as it may deem appropriate”.

In short, what the Jim Crow states were doing fifty years ago can no longer justify preclearance. But if a court finds a state is doing something bad right now, and if it believes that new bad things are likely to keep happening in that state, it can re-institute preclearance for that state.

On July 25, Attorney General Holder announced he would take this path, and his test case is Texas, where there is an ongoing lawsuit about redistricting and alleged attempts to gerrymander Hispanics out of their fair representation in the legislature. Holder also plans to challenge the Texas photo-ID law, which the Justice Department had blocked under the now-inapplicable Section 5. (Texas’ photo-ID law is particularly insidious. Yes, you can get a free state ID card if you don’t already have a drivers’ license; but in the heavily-Hispanic parts of the state, you might have to get somebody to drive you 100 miles to the nearest office that can issue such an ID. The Justice Department charges that 1.5 million eligible Texas voters lack photo IDs, while Texas counters that “only” 795,000 do. And a gun permit is considered adequate ID for voting, but a University of Texas student ID isn’t.)

Eventually, one such case is going to get back to the Supreme Court, and then we’ll find out something about our five conservative justices: Do they just dislike Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act? Or do they dislike the voting rights Section 4 protected?

August 5, 2013 – 8:10 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Two featured articles this week: One about the chaos currently reigning in Congress (mainly that the House Republican majority seems unable to turn their Ryan budget into any actual appropriations, raising the possibility that the government might shut down in October not by intentional obstruction, but by simple inability to pull anything together) and the other a one-month-later look at voting rights since the Supreme Court invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Right Act. (The voting-rights issue produces this week’s lead quote, from dissenting Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.”)

The weekly summary collects some video continuing the national conversation on race, including a great TED talk by Peggy McIntosh and Jay Smooth’s reply to Don Lemon. In the “you may also be interested” section, a wonderful candidacy-rollout by the Democrat challenging Mitch McConnell (complete with grandmothers); Fox’s awful Reza Aslan interview; and a graph showing just how Republican-slanted the coverage of the IRS pseudo-scandal has been.

And we close with the cutest video ever — a clan of bears each trying to scratch itself on the same tree.

The voting-rights article will come out first, then Congress, then the weekly summary.

August 5, 2013 – 6:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Real questions

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

— W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

This week everybody was talking about the royal baby, Anthony Weiner’s sexting, and other stuff I don’t care about

I don’t really get the monarchy, and (like the NYT editorial board) I’m wishing Weiner would just go away. I blame Weiner for the fact that Steely Dan’s “Do it Again” was in my head all week. But Slate’s sexting pseudonym generator was fun. It dealt me “Bernardo Death”, a name that’s yours if you want it, since I don’t plan to use it anytime soon.

Speaking of over-sharing online, everybody was also talking about Geraldo Rivera’s almost-naked tweet, accompanied by the comment “70 is the new 50.” The most charitable response came from the ever-upbeat Chris Hayes:

I am on Team Geraldo on this one. I mean, if I look like this at 70, I will be sure as heck tweeting out shirtless selfies every single day. That’s a promise America.

Chris will turn 70 on February 28, 2049, in case that affects your plans.

and maneuvering in anticipation of this Fall’s apocalyptic budget battle

ObamaCare is about to go into full operation, and so far the indications are that it’s going to work fine — low premiums, few unintended effects — making liars out of all the death-panel panic-mongers. That looming disaster (for them, not for the country) has Republicans planning a last-ditch defense: Shut the government down if Democrats won’t agree to defund the program.

Even a lot of Republicans (i.e., Tom Coburn) think that’s a losing confrontation, so it will be interesting to see if the Tea Party radicals can push it through the House. Liberals seem to be looking forward to the fight.

An interesting bit of word-watch: More and more people are using the word sabotage to describe Republican anti-Obamacare tactics. What they’re doing is unprecedented and way past any notion of a loyal opposition.

but I tried to further the national conversation on race

This week’s featured article is Sadly, the national conversation about race has to start here. A number of conservatives had an in-your-face response to President Obama’s call for dialog. But they did lay out a point of view that probably sounds sensible to a lot of their white-conservative audience. If we want to move those people, I think we have to start where they are.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember ALEC, the corporate shadow government that authored so many of the state laws on union busting and voter suppression? Well, they’ve also got a set of proposals to replace public schools with for-profit schools. It’s all well designed to look like it benefits kids and parents, but the real plums go to the corporations that fund ALEC.

Whatever it is that’s killing bees may be more complicated than we thought.

and let’s close with something awe-inspiring

July 29, 2013 – 12:20 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here

a liberal attempt to meet conservatives where they are

This week a number of conservative opinion-leaders took up President Obama’s challenge to have a national conversation on race. “You want a conversation, you got it,” Bill O’Reilly retorted combatively, denouncing “race hustlers and the grievance industry” and arguing that President Obama “has no clue at all about how to solve problems within the black community.”

That may not have been the response liberals were hoping for, but it’s the one we got. So OK, let’s start there: not just with O’Reilly, but also Rush Limbaugh, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, and the National Review’s Victor Hanson. Together, those four represent a significant and diverse audience on the Right, not just one guy popping off.

And they paint a unified picture, which I will call the Response. I suspect most of my liberal readers won’t get far into those links before tripping some rhetorical land mine that makes it impossible to keep paying attention calmly, so let me abstract the Response’s main points:

  • Slavery ended a century and a half ago. Back in the 1960s, we got rid of Jim Crow, and made explicit discrimination against blacks illegal. So that’s all ancient history and isn’t relevant to today’s problems. O’Reilly: “you cannot … design effective public policy that solves present problems by dwelling on the sins of the past.” Rubin: We should “not be held prisoners forever in a past that most Americans have never personally experienced.”
  • The ongoing problems of the black community are its own fault and can only be solved by blacks making better individual choices: getting off drugs, renouncing violence, and forming traditional families that take responsibility for their children. O’Reilly: “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. Right now about 73 percent of all black babies are born out of wedlock. … White people don’t force black people to have babies out of wedlock. That’s a personal decision; a decision that has devastated millions of children and led to disaster both socially and economically. So raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that; again, it is a personal decision.”
  • Young black men are racially profiled by police and private citizens like George Zimmerman, not because of racism, but because they commit more crimes. Hanson: “The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime.”
  • Blacks would rather blame whites for their problems than accept their own responsibility. Liberal politicians and black community leaders pander to this denial and stir up black anger against whites to further their own careers. Rubin: “I think it is time to stop using this both as a crutch and as a method for stirring up [Obama’s] base. … I thought we had gotten to the point where whites, blacks, Republicans, Democrats realized that there are certain problems in the African-American community that need to be addressed, but that at this point — however we got here — we’re here and we should start working on them: start having policies that are family-friendly, start having policies that if not reward at least encourage young men to take responsibility for the children they create. And instead, no, he’s there telling them it’s slavery or Jim Crow or something else. It’s really a horrible message.” O’Reilly: “Race hustlers and the grievance industry have intimidated the so-called ‘conversation’, turning any valid criticism of African-American culture into charges of racial bias. … It is now time for the African-American leadership, including President Obama to stop the nonsense. Walk away from the world of victimization and grievance and lead the way out of this mess.”
  • The same politicians and leaders show no interest in the victims (even black victims) of crimes committed by blacks. Hanson: “The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.”
  • Liberals want whites to feel guilty about racism, but the vast majority of today’s whites have nothing to feel guilty about. Limbaugh: “It’s time for all this white guilt to end. … White guilt is doing nothing for anybody, and white guilt is not solving anything. And besides that, a little history lesson for you: If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians.”

I’ve done my best to make a fair summary; if you hear something else in those links, think I have taken the quotes out of context, or believe I’ve constructed straw men that don’t really represent what conservatives think, please comment.

How to answer? First, let me say that I’m not surprised that a number of liberals reacted with anger. As I said, the four pieces (and many others) are filled with barbs that seem designed to shut down the conversation rather than move it forward. The in-your-face tone is most obvious if you watch O’Reilly; the topic seems to call for sorrow, but by the end of the segment he has worked himself up into a rage.

One advantage I get from being white is that it’s easier not to take those barbs or that anger personally. If my everyday experience included racial slights that sometimes progressed into unforgettably ugly incidents, I probably couldn’t listen as sympathetically to the conservative view.

But I’ve chosen not to return insult for insult and anger for anger because I’m not focusing on O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Rubin, and Hanson themselves, but on the audience of more-or-less well-meaning whites — some of whom I grew up with — who hear the Response and think: “That makes a lot of sense.” Angry blasts from the Left, I know, just harden them in that point of view.

First reply: Who are you arguing with? It’s tempting to jump into details of the Response and start disputing facts. But the most poisonous parts of the Response are the unstated assumptions behind it, not the particular details. If I argue facts and leave those assumptions unchallenged, new facts can be found (or stretched) to fill the gap.

What assumptions? Well, listening to the Response, you get the impression that someone — maybe Obama or “race hustlers” like Jesse Jackson — is arguing the opposite side: Someone is telling blacks to blame whites for all their problems, look to the government for salvation, and not accept any responsibility themselves.

That’s just not true. In reality, no one is making that case.

That may be hard to believe if you’re a white conservative who only sees black activists in the clips Fox News decides to air. But last summer, for example, Jesse Jackson said this:

Each year … about 7,000 African Americans are murdered, more than nine times out of 10 by other African Americans. … If a foreign foe took these lives, we would mobilize armies and armadas to stop them. But here, because much of this violence is contained in racially concentrated neighborhoods, there is too much resignation and too little outrage.

It wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark. Jackson was announcing marches in 20 cities to draw attention to the violence problem. After the Justice-for-Trayvon marches conservatives asked: Why don’t black leaders organize marches against black-on-black violence? Well, they do. Fox just doesn’t cover it.

And did you know that Barack Obama said this?

You and I know … that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

That was in 2008 when he was a candidate. He has stuck with that message as president. In a commencement address to all-male, historically black Morehouse College this May, Obama again pushed graduates to take personal responsibility rather than use racism as an excuse:

We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.

When they address black audiences, the President and the First Lady have held so steady on that personal-responsibility theme that other blacks sometimes criticize their “finger-wagging tone“.

So if you’re white and get your racial information from conservative sources — especially if you live in a suburb or rural area far removed from the inner city — let me (and Tim Wise) suggest that you are being fooled. Black leaders who speak out against racism are not making the whitey-caused-all-our-problems argument.

It’s not an either/or. Believing that white racism is still a problem doesn’t mean that you think blacks are helpless victims who can only plead for whites to change or wait for the government to save them.

In short, there is no “grievance industry”.

Does the Response have any constructive point? My fellow white liberal Tim Wise calls the Response “white deflection”, because it doesn’t lead to any positive action. White opinion-leaders telling their white audiences that blacks are to blame for their own problems — that’s an excuse for turning the whole discussion off rather than solving anything.

Republicans control one house of Congress and the entire governments of the states that contain Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, and Milwaukee. If they are in fact deeply concerned about the disintegration of the black family or inner city unemployment or black-on-black violence — if those issues are more than just excuses for whites to ignore racism — what constructive proposals have they put forward?

Bill O’Reilly is the exception that proves the rule: He followed up the piece I quoted with his plan for solving inner-city violence: “the feds should criminalize all gun crimes and impose strict mandatory sentences upon conviction” — as if this punish-them-harder idea is brand new and not what we’ve been doing for decades.

OK, maybe conservative office-holders aren’t proposing anything because they don’t believe in government solutions. Fine, but what about private efforts to discourage violence or promote education or help families in poor urban neighborhoods? Conservative media voices could be telling you which ones work and where you could effectively volunteer or send money. But they seldom do, because they are just raising these issues to shut off an uncomfortable conversation, not turn it in a more constructive direction. Conservative pundits will stop talking about black problems as soon as the Trayvon Martin controversy fades, because all they really want is for the topic to go away.

Black-on-nonblack crime. In the Asian-American murders Hanson discusses, he knows the perpetrator was black because the man was caught and charged without any public outcry. No one needed to march or protest, because the system was working fine.

To make Hanson’s case similar to Zimmerman/Martin, you’d have to assume that police found an armed black man standing next to the bodies, believed his story, didn’t immediately secure the area as a crime scene or canvass for witnesses, and let the man go until protests and bad publicity forced them to arrest him.

But of course that didn’t happen. It never would.

White-on-white? Yes, 93% of ten murdered blacks are killed by other blacks. But the same Justice Department report says (on page 13) 84% of murdered whites are killed by whites. This is why The Guardian’s style guide bans the term black-on-black violence:

imagine the police saying they were “investigating an incident of white-on-white violence”.

Again, that would never happen.

Racism in the justice system is real. Once you get past all the distracting noise, you’re left to deal with the facts of racism in the justice system. And I’m not just talking about the fact that blacks are more likely than whites to be in prison. (Those statistics cut both ways; they can be used to claim that blacks commit more crimes than whites.)

No, I’m talking about facts that are much harder to explain away:

  • Black murderers are more likely to be executed than white murderers. A report by the Death Penalty Information Center said: “The researchers found that, even after controlling for case differences, blacks in Philadelphia were substantially more likely to get the death penalty than other defendants who committed similar murders. Black defendants faced odds of receiving a death sentence that were 3.9 times higher than other similarly situated defendants.”
  • Juries are less likely to believe black self-defense claims. Anecdotally, many are contrasting George Zimmerman’s successful self-defense plea with John White’s unsuccessful plea in a black-on-white killing and Marissa Alexander’s unsuccessful stand-your-ground claim in a black-on-black case. Statistics tell the same story: Juries are most likely to accept self-defense claims when whites kill blacks, least likely when blacks kill whites.
  • Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates, but blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for it. And communities that decriminalize marijuana tend to have small black populations; apparently, smoking pot is less serious when whites do it.
  • Crimes mostly committed by blacks are likely to carry far higher punishments than similar crimes mostly committed by whites. The most famous example is crack cocaine (popular among blacks) vs powder cocaine (popular among whites). For years, getting caught with 99 grams of powder would get you a lower sentence than 1 gram of crack. In 2011, the 100-to-1 ratio was reduced to 18-to-1.

That final point can be pushed a lot further if you’re willing to look at crimes that are harder to compare: Street crime carries far higher penalties than white-collar crime. A black pickpocket who steals your wallet is a lot more likely to go to jail than a white banker who illegally forecloses on your house. In fact, the number of crimes committed by corporations and the over-representation of whites in corporate management casts doubt on the claim that blacks commit more (or more serious) crimes than whites.

Group guilt. I still haven’t touched Limbaugh’s comments on white guilt. Actually (ignoring his trolling about slavery) I agree with a big chunk of what he said: Whites sitting around feeling guilty doesn’t help anybody.

But who’s asking us to? If you think the point of the Martin protests is for you to feel guilty for something your ancestors — or maybe just people who superficially resemble you — did a long time ago, I don’t think you’re getting an accurate account.

Here’s the actual point the Martin case has raised: Blacks still suffer unfairly from racial stereotypes. Those stereotypes have deep roots in slavery and Jim Crow, but the damage is here and now. Because of those stereotypes, whites are way too quick to assume that blacks are up to no good, that blacks deserve any misfortune they get, and that the best way to deal with black people’s problems is to punish them harder. Whites are too slow to consider a black person’s point of view and too slow to take seriously any problem that mainly affects blacks.

Here’s what you’re being asked to do about it: Personally, introspect to see how those stereotypes live and function in your own mind. (Here’s a place I notice it: When some jerk cuts me off in traffic, I get a bigger surge of anger if it’s a black jerk, like that’s some separate category entirely.) When you have to make a decision about a black person — whether you’re on a jury or a hiring committee — notice your tendency to jump to unfair race-based conclusions and try to resist it.

Politically, join the fight for justice. Help us roll back unfair laws and change processes that produce unfairly skewed results. Help us create the equality of opportunity that American ideals demand. And if you think an underlying obstacle to opportunity is drugs or bad parenting or whatever, find some constructive way to work on that, rather than use it as an excuse to do nothing.

And finally, if it makes you mad that someone might hold you responsible for things other white people did, use that resentment to understand how blacks feel when they are racially profiled. Unlike the largely imaginary white guilt, profiling has real effects. As you read these words, innocent young blacks are being stopped and frisked for weapons by New York police, not on suspicion of any specific crime, but because people who superficially resemble them have done bad things in the past.

You reject racial guilt in your own life. Take a principled stand and help other people fight it too.

July 29, 2013 – 9:37 am Categories: Articles | Comments (36)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s Sift is dominated by my attempt to meet white conservatives where they are on racial issues, “Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here”.

I read the in-your-face conservative responses to President Obama’s call for a conversation, ignored the barbs and insults and slanted facts, pieced together the worldview that seems to lie behind most of them, and answered as if I were talking to a misguided-but-well-intentioned cousin or uncle or friend from the old neighborhood.

It’s a long piece — largely because I think it’s necessary to establish that I really get the conservative view I’m responding to before I respond — but I think it’s worth it. I hope it gets forwarded to a lot of people’s cousins and uncles and friends from the old neighborhood.

That doesn’t leave much space in the Weekly Summary for talking about the cracks forming in Republican solidarity as they plan a last-ditch defense against the looming success of ObamaCare. And no space at all for the week’s biggest story — the royal baby. Not that I’d have given it space anyway.

July 29, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)