The Myth of the Zombie Voter

If you ever argue with conservative friends about voter-ID laws, invariably they will bring up the threat of “zombie voters” — fraudulent votes cast in the name of people who were already dead on election day.

In truth, zombie voters are as much of a myth as zombies in general. But you’ll never convince your friends of that, because they’ve seen countless segments on Fox News in which some Republican official announces — in terms that seem too specific to be made up — that dead people have voted. It’s a very convincing technique that goes back to Joe McCarthy’s list of 205 known Communists in the State Department in 1950. (If he’d just said generally that there were some Communists in the State Department, people might have thought he was exaggerating for effect. But a list of 205 of them! He couldn’t make that up, could he?)

The story always goes like this: A computer search produces a list of possible zombie voters, and the right-wing media goes wild with calls for voter ID laws (always conveniently designed to make voting harder for Democratic-leaning blocs of marginal voters like college students, the disabled, and the urban poor). If anybody investigates further, though, a few months later they’ll have discovered that none of the cases pan out. No actual zombies are found. But because that outcome is boring, nobody covers it — least of all Fox.

The most recent example of this pattern comes from South Carolina. In January of 2012, SC Attorney General Alan Wilson was making the tour of conservative media outlets, saying stuff like this:

we found out that there were over 900 people who died and then subsequently voted. That number could be even higher than that, Bill. So this is just an example.

and this:

We know for a fact that there are deceased people whose identities are being used in elections in South Carolina.

More specifically, the state DMV had compared its death data against the voting records for the previous six years and found “953 ballots cast by voters listed as dead“!

At least that was the story until they started showing those 953 names to people who actually know something about elections. Testifying to the legislature, State Elections Commissioner Marci Andino explained the six names she had seen from one county:

one had cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; and two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list.

This kind of stuff happens all the time — poll workers are mostly volunteers, after all — and explains why the zombie-voter story is itself impossible to kill: You could do a similar records search after any election anywhere, and come up with a similar list of possible zombie voters. The existence of such a list sounds horrifying, but it says nothing about the integrity of the election.

So OK, 953 is an exaggeration. But if you went through all the names, you’d find some zombie voters, right? By April, the State Election Commission had gone through all 207 cases from the 2010 election and had explained all but 10 of them, with no clear zombie-voter evidence even in those 10. State police later whittled those 10 down to 3, and recommended no further investigation.

I expect we’ll wait a long time for Fox to bring Alan Wilson back to comment on this, but fortunately Columbia, S.C.’s weekly Free Times stuck with the story and made an open-records request to get the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division’s final 500-page report on the 953 zombie voters. On July 3, FT reported:

a state police investigation found no indication that anyone purposefully cast a ballot using the name of a dead person in South Carolina. … SLED found no indication of voter fraud.

That result probably didn’t surprise election expert Richard Hasan, who told Bill Moyers last September:

It’s no surprise that the numbers [of prosecutions] are so low, because voter impersonation fraud is an exceedingly dumb way to try to steal an election.

Why is it dumb? You have to steal votes one-by-one, in a time-consuming way, and you face the constant possibility that you might be caught by a poll worker who knew the person you’re claiming to be, or saw the obituary in the local newspaper. To swing an election that way, you’d need a large conspiracy. Somebody would get caught, and somebody would talk. It’s not worth the risk.

So has anybody ever successfully voted more than once by impersonating a dead person? Maybe, somewhere. It’s not impossible. But does anyone organize such efforts to produce enough zombie votes to sway an election (even a very close election)? Pretty conclusively, the answer is no.

Just look at South Carolina in 2010. Around 1.3 million votes were cast in a moderately close governor’s race that year, which Nikki Haley won by 60,000. How many of those votes came from dead-person impersonators? Possibly zero, but after extensive investigation we can be sure that there were no more than 3.

July 15, 2013 – 9:09 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Welcome to any new readers who are checking out the Sift because they liked last week’s featured post “Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination, which is now the sixth most popular post since the blog moved to weeklysift.com two years ago. Posts appear on this blog every Monday between mid-morning and early afternoon (New Hampshire time).

This week will have two featured posts: “If You Want to Succeed, Start Failing” begins with the women’s-rights protests in Texas and Moral Monday protests in North Carolina — neither of which can prevail in the short term over Republican majorities in the legislature — and explains why this kind of spitting-into-the-prevailing-wind is the only way the wind ever changes. I’ll close by listing some doomed proposals that progressives should put more energy into.

“The Myth of the Zombie Voter” is one to email to your conservative friends who are sure dead people are voting, because they’ve heard reputable-sounding state officials tell them so on Fox News. Eighteen months ago, the South Carolina attorney general was making the tour of conservative media outlets with a claim that he had found 953 zombie voters in his state. But Columbia, S.C.’s Free Times did the follow-up Fox never does, and got hold of the state police investigation of that list. Let’s just say it returned the zombies to their graves.

This week’s summary post will discuss the Zimmerman verdict and the riots-that-didn’t-happen in response, that strange Iowa case where the state supreme court affirmed an employer’s right to fire a woman for being too attractive, the increasing dysfunction of the House Republican majority and the renewed effort for filibuster reform in the Senate, and yet another push by the Religious Right to use “religious freedom” as an offensive weapon.

“Zombie Voters” is almost ready to go and should be out shortly.

July 15, 2013 – 8:18 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Turning Pages

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. So when we said that the revolution would not be televised, we were saying that the thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’ll just be something that you see, and then all of a sudden you realize “I’m on the wrong page.”

— Gil Scott Heron

This week everybody was talking about Egypt

and nobody knew what to think. Was it a revolution? A coup? The start of a civil war? Should we be happy because a popular movement for democracy succeeded in getting rid of an unresponsive government, or is that mob rule? Unhappy because the trash-canned government had been elected and was not replaced by constitutional means? Happy/unhappy because we fear/like the Muslim Brotherhood that won the election that formed the government? Unhappy/happy because we distrust/trust the Egyptian military that is setting up the provisional government? At times it’s best just to admit that you don’t understand and keep watching.

and the San Francisco plane crash

which is the kind of breaking news the Sift doesn’t cover very well. Turn on your TV.

and the 4th of July

Some patriotic videos never get old. I enjoy this 2002 celebration of the Declaration of Independence by Morgan Freeman and an all-star cast.

and a lot of stuff I’m studiously not paying attention to

like the Zimmerman trial and the chase after Snowden. I explained why last week.

because other stuff deserves a lot more attention than it’s getting

Some establishment liberals haven’t been taking the NSA leaks seriously, because who is this Snowden guy and why did he leak through Glenn Greenwald, who isn’t a “serious” journalist anyway. Well, the NYT’s Pulitzer-winning Eric Lichtblau has a new set of revelations. Listening yet?

Lichtblau has gotten access to classified documents from the secret FISA Court, and finds that it’s doing a lot more than just signing search warrants. It’s issuing sweeping legal opinions about the meaning of the Fourth Amendment (which protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizures”). Those opinions come out of a star-chamber process which only hears the government’s side of a case. The judges themselves are appointed by Chief Justice Roberts, and almost all were originally appointed to the judiciary by Republican presidents.

The FISA Court’s opinions have the force of law for the people who are cleared to read them — mostly the NSA, CIA, and others who would like to know what you’re doing. Its interpretation of the Fourth Amendment could be overruled by the Supreme Court, but since the unrepresented non-government side never finds out that it lost, who is going to appeal the case?

So in summary, your constitutional rights are at the mercy of a secret court that is far more authoritarian than the American judiciary as a whole. And you have no right to know what that court is doing to your rights, because Catch-22 says they don’t have to tell you what Catch-22 says.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are working on their ransom letter for the fall, when they once again plan to take the full-faith-and-credit of the United States hostage by provoking a debt-ceiling crisis. (“Nice country you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) The National Journal says they’re willing to extend the debt ceiling for the rest of Obama’s term in exchange for, say, privatizing Medicare — a highly unpopular concession they could never get through any legitimate democratic process.

The debt ceiling, you may recall, didn’t exist until 1917, and while extending it has often been an occasion for the out-of-power party to make pious speeches about fiscal responsibility, never in history had it been used to extract concessions until 2011. Until the Tea Party, nobody was so committed to an unpopular agenda that it was willing to threaten that much damage to the country.

and I wrote about the misuse of “religious freedom”

in “Religious Freedom” Means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination.

and you also might be interested in …

Bill Keller explains why liberals should be happy with the Senate immigration bill. Not that it matters, because that bill has washed up on the rocky shore of the House.

In related news: Remember November, when Republicans had learned the importance of the Hispanic vote and figured they had to do something to appeal to it? Never mind about that. The new line coming out of conservatives is that they just need to do a better job appealing to whites.

At some point, the Republican efforts to sabotage ObamaCare turn into active disloyalty. For example, interfering with the administration’s efforts to tell the public how to use the new program. Democrats didn’t like Bush’s Medicare Part D, or the strong-arm tactics used to pass it, but they didn’t try to make it not work.

More debunking of the IRS “scandal”.

What if gun rights were treated the way abortion rights are?

Or if we thought about mass shootings the way we think about terrorist attacks?

Here’s another great visual of Republican men signing away women’s rights. After all, why should there be any women in the room?

I don’t know whether this guy scares the government or not, but he scares me.

And I guess it really shouldn’t be surprising that the KKK has a show for (white) kids.

or that Colorado preachers are blaming local wildfires on abortion, civil unions, and women’s breasts.

Student loan interest rates doubled on July 1. But don’t worry. Congress will get to it sometime. It’s not like the issue affects people’s lives or anything..

Now that there’s practically no competition, Amazon isn’t discounting books like it used to. Who could have foreseen that? I wonder what will happen when all of retail comes down to Amazon or WalMart?

Gil Scott Heron explains what “The revolution will not be televised” meant.

And something fun to end with:

If you’ve ever envied those fantasy worlds where place-names actually mean something, take a look at this real-world map, which traces current names back to their linguistic roots, like “Navel of the Moon” and “Abundance of Fish”.

July 8, 2013 – 1:12 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

“Religious Freedom” means Christian Passive-Aggressive Domination

In an Orwellian inversion, “freedom” is now a tool for controlling others.

It’s over. Try something else.

For many anti-gay activists, the recent Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and Proposition 8 were the handwriting on the wall.

It wasn’t just that they didn’t get the result they wanted, but that in DOMA the Court’s majority simply didn’t buy the argument that homosexuality represents a threat to society. Neither does the general public, which supports that decision 56%-41%. (The margin under age 40 is 67%-30%, with 48% approving strongly.) The big post-DOMA public demonstrations expressed joy, not anger.

Just a few years ago anti-marriage-equality referendums were winning in states all over the country, but in 2012 one failed in Minnesota, while referendums legalizing same-sex marriage won at in Washington, Maryland, and Maine. Ten years ago, the first legislatures to make same-sex marriage legal were dragged by their state courts, but this year Delaware, Rhode Island, and Minnesota went there voluntarily, bringing the number of states where same-sex marriage is legal (as of August 1) to 13, plus the District of Columbia. (I’ll guess Oregon and Illinois will go next.)

It’s even clear why this is happening: Because gay millennials are not in the closet, everybody under 30 has gay and lesbian friends who dream about meeting their soulmates just like straight people do. To young Americans, laws blocking that worthy aspiration are pointlessly cruel and ultimately will not stand — not in Alabama, not in Utah, not anywhere.

So the generational tides run against the bigots of the Religious Right. Some still aren’t admitting it, but wiser heads are recognizing that it’s time to switch to Plan B.

The new face of bigotry: “freedom”. Fortunately for them, there’s a well-worked-out back-up plan: religious “freedom”.

Accept the inevitability of gay rights, advises Ross Douthat, but “build in as many protections for religious liberty as possible along the way.” Here’s the idea: If your disapproval of certain kinds of people can be rooted in church doctrine or a handful Biblical proof-texts, then forbidding you to mistreat those people violates the “free exercise” of religion you are promised by the First Amendment.

To make this work, conservative Christians need to divert attention from the people they are mistreating by portraying themselves as the victims. And that requires cultivating a hyper-sensitivity to any form of involvement in activities they disapprove of. So rather than sympathize with the lesbian couple who gets the bakery door slammed in their faces, the public should instead sympathize with the poor wedding-cake baker whose moral purity is besmirched when the labor of his hands is used in a celebration of immorality and perversion.

There’s a name for this tactic: passive aggression. It’s like on Sanford & Son when Fred would clutch his heart and start talking to his dead wife because Lamont planned to do something he disapproved of. Passive aggression is the last resort of people who have neither the power to get their way nor any reasonable argument why they should.

In fact the baker will be fine, as Willamette Week demonstrated by calling two such religious-liberty-defending bakeries and ordering cakes to celebrate a variety of other events conservative Christians disapprove of: a child born out of wedlock, a divorce party, a pagan solstice ritual. The bakers did not object, because their hyper-sensitive moral purity is an invention, a convenient excuse for treating same-sex couples badly.

But Jim DeMint insists that

A photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington, and a baker in Colorado have already been victims of such intolerant coercion.

And Matthew Franck is horrified that religious universities will have to provide same-sex married-student housing; religious “schools, universities, hospitals, hospices, and clinics; social service agencies, retirement homes, eldercare and childcare facilities, food pantries, and soup kitchens” who employ “teachers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, counselors and clinicians, caregivers, food-service workers, housekeeping and grounds staff, even pool lifeguards” won’t be able to refuse employment to people with same-sex spouses. Adoption services, marriage counselors, divorce lawyers, artificial insemination clinics etc. will have to deal with gay and lesbian couples … as if they were real human beings or something.

The race parallel. We worked this stuff out during the civil rights movement, because all the same ideas show up with regard to race.

Plenty of people claim a sincere religious belief in white supremacy, and root it in Biblical texts like the Curse of Ham. (This goes way back: American slave-owners found Biblical license for keeping their “property”.) But the law does not honor these claims, and somehow religion in America survives.

Here’s the principle that has served us well: In private life, you can associate with anybody you like and avoid anybody you don’t like. But if you offer goods or services for sale to the public, you don’t get to define who “the public” is. So when you’re making lunch at your house, you can invite anybody you like and snub anybody you don’t like, but if you run a lunch counter you have to serve blacks.

We’ve been living with principle for decades, and (other than Rand Paul) no one worries much about the racists’ loss of freedom.

That should apply to same-sex couples now: If your chapel is reserved for members of your congregation, fine. But if you rent it to the public for wedding ceremonies, same-sex couples are part of the public just like interracial couples are. You don’t get to define them away.

If that makes you reconsider whether you want to be open to the public, well, that’s your decision.

The sky will not fall. We just went through this with the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, which supposedly would violate the religious “freedom” of evangelical military chaplains (who apparently had never before needed interact respectfully with people they believed were sinners). The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins predicted:

You have over 200 sponsoring organizations that may be prevented from sponsoring chaplains because they hold orthodox Christian views that will be in conflict with what the military says is stated policy.

That stated policy was: “All service members will continue to serve with others who may hold different views and beliefs, and they will be expected to treat everyone with respect.”

AP went looking for chaplains who couldn’t live with that and found “perhaps two or three departures of active-duty chaplains linked to the repeal.” A Catholic priest overseeing 50 other chaplains reported “I’ve received no complaints from chaplains raising concerns that their ministries were in any way conflicted or constrained.”

If any of Perkins’ 200 religious organizations has stopped sponsoring chaplains because DADT is gone, I haven’t heard about it. The chaplains’ hyper-sensitivity to openly gay soldiers was imaginary, and went away when the government refused to take it seriously.

The abortion parallels. The reason the Religious Right believes their passive-aggressive “religious freedom” approach will work on same-sex marriage is that the same approach is already working on reproductive rights.

It all started with a reasonable compromise: After the Religious Right lost the battle to keep abortion illegal, laws guaranteed that doctors who believe abortion is murder can’t be forced to perform one. This is similar to letting pacifists be conscientious objectors in war, and I completely support it.

But from there, Religious Right “freedom” has become a weapon to beat down the rights of everyone else. Since 1976, Medicaid has not paid for abortions — at a considerable cost to the government, since birth and child support are far more expensive — because pro-life taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund something they think is immoral. There’s no parallel to this anywhere else: The taxes of pacifist Quakers pay for weapons; the taxes of Jews and Muslims pay the salaries of federal pork inspectors.

Conservatives like to accuse gays and blacks of claiming “special rights”, well this is a special right: The conservative conscience gets considerations that nobody else’s conscience gets.

And conservative special rights keep growing. The argument for defunding Planned Parenthood is that public money not only shouldn’t pay for abortions, it shouldn’t even mix with money that pays for abortions. (“Giving taxpayer funds to abortion businesses that also provide non-abortion services subsidizes abortion,” says one petition.) I had a hard time imagining a parallel, but I finally came up with one: What if Jews were so sensitive to violations of the kosher rules that Food Stamps couldn’t be used (by anyone, for anything) in groceries that sold pork?

That would be absurd, wouldn’t it?

In some states, medical “conscience” laws now protect anyone in the medical system who wants to express their moral condemnation: If the pharmacist disapproves of your contraceptives, he doesn’t have to fill your prescription. One of the examples cited by the model conscience law of Americans United for Life as something that needs to be fixed is “an ambulance driver in Illinois being fired for refusing to take a woman to an abortion clinic”.

Clearly that ambulance driver’s immortal soul was at risk. The hyper-sensitive pro-life conscience needs to be protected from any contact with women making use of their constitutional rights.

Religious “freedom” and contraception. The other front in the religious “freedom” battle is contraception.

The Obama administration has had a lot of trouble finding the proper religious exemption to the contraception provisions of the Affordable Care Act. That’s because it’s hard to find the “right” version of something that shouldn’t exist at all. Contraception coverage does not violate any legitimate notion of religious freedom for any religious organizations, religious affiliated organizations, or religious individual employers. Their claims should be rejected without compromise.

The principle here ought to be simple: The employer isn’t paying for contraception or any other medical procedure; the employer is paying for health insurance. Health insurance is part of a worker’s earnings, just like a paycheck. And just like a paycheck, what the employee chooses to do with that health insurance is none of the employer’s business. If I’m the secretary of an orthodox rabbi, his religious freedom isn’t violated when I cash my paycheck and buy a ham sandwich. Ditto for contraceptives, health insurance, and the secretary of the Archbishop of Boston.

Religious organizations’ hyper-sensitive consciences are pure passive aggression. The classic example here is Wheaton College, which couldn’t join other religious organizations in their suit against the ACA because it discovered that it had inadvertently already covered the contraceptives that the tyrannical ACA was going to force it to cover. This was such a huge moral issue for the college that nobody there had noticed.

Worst of all is the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, which got a favorable ruling on an injunction recently. The Hobby Lobby case is the mating of two bad ideas — corporate personhood and employers’ right to control the medical choices of their employees — to produce something truly monstrous. HL’s case hangs on its claim that it is a “person” with regard to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, and so its corporate “religious freedom” allows it to restrict its employees’ access to contraception.

Persecution or Privilege? Here are the kinds of sacrifices I make for my readers: I listened to the full half-hour of James Dobson’s post-DOMA radio show, where Dobson, Perkins, and Bill Becker threw around phrases like “the collapse of Western civilization in one day” and “the whole superstructure … can come down”. They described Christians as “an oppressed minority” and agreed that “persecution is likely in the days to come”.

But what is “persecution” exactly?

Tony Perkins expresses the challenge like this:

Do you believe God’s word is true and therefore you’re going to live your life based upon that truth, or are you going to shrink back in the fear of man and of them calling you bigots.

Whenever Christians discuss their “oppression”, fear of being called bigots plays a central role. According to CNN’s Belief Blog,

[Peter] Sprigg and other evangelicals say changing attitudes toward homosexuality have created a new victim: closeted Christians who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality but will not say so publicly for fear of being labeled a hateful bigot.

In other words: Christians are oppressed unless they can express their moral condemnation of others without being subject to moral condemnation themselves.

Why would anyone imagine the existence of such a one-sided right? Simple: In practical terms, that’s a right they have had until recent years. Not so long ago, the James Dobson types were so intimidating that they could preach any kind of vicious nonsense about gays and face no response.

So what they are experiencing now isn’t persecution, it’s privileged distress, the anxiety a privileged class feels as its privileges fade and it slides towards equality with others. And rather than try to get over their distress and soothe their anxiety, they are intentionally pumping it up in a passive-aggressive attempt to claim victimhood and control the rest of us.

That bubble needs to be popped.

July 8, 2013 – 11:37 am Categories: Articles | Comments (67)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The Sift’s featured article this week will be a look at the Religious Right’s fallback position as it loses its ability to dictate the law on issues like same-sex marriage: redefining “religious freedom” to mean that their values should continue to dominate. By cultivating a passive-aggressive hyper-sensitivity to anything they disapprove of, the traditional-values crowd can claim persecution whenever they are forced to recognize that other people have rights.

In the weekly summary, I punt on the Egyptian revolution/coup/civil war because I have no idea what’s really going on. (Wouldn’t you love to hear Wolf Blitzer admit that sometime?) I also punt on the SFO plane crash, because other sources cover breaking news much better than I do. And I’m still ignoring Zimmerman and Snowden for reasons I explained last week.

So what’s left? Well, the NYT’s Pulitzer-winning Eric Lichtblau pulled back the FISA Court’s curtain of secrecy, and what he found should worry you. Also, the National Journal told us about the ransom demands the House Republicans plan to make in the fall, when they take the debt ceiling hostage again. I found both of those stories far more consequential than the Zimmerman trial.

The best patriotic 4th of July clip I found was still a 2002 recitation of the Declaration of Independence led by Morgan Freeman. And there’s some fun stuff going around. I really enjoyed the world map that takes all the place-names back to their roots, so that Panama becomes “Abundance of Fish” and Australia “Land of the South Wind”.

 

July 8, 2013 – 7:51 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Making Lives Better

You guys for a generation have argued that public policy ought to demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist. But you don’t make any less of us exist, you are just arguing for more discrimination. And more discrimination doesn’t make straight people’s lives any better.

— Rachel Maddow to Jim DeMint on Meet the Press yesterday

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is like a college student who gets his term papers done at the last minute. The Court’s term ended this week, so Tuesday it overturned the part of the Voting Rights Act that forces states with a history of discrimination to pre-clear their voting laws with the Justice Department, and Wednesday it released two major same-sex-marriage decisions: The federal government has to recognize all marriages blessed by the states, even the same-sex marriages DOMA was designed not to recognize; and same-sex marriages can be performed again in California, because a lower court ruling overturning Proposition 8 stands.

The texts of the decisions are here: Voting Rights Act, DOMA, Prop 8.

Because I agreed with the DOMA decision and disagreed with VRA, reading them back-to-back put me in a good position to write a calm, thoughtful analysis of the quality of the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence: This Court Sucks.

Within 48 hours of the VRA decision, Republicans in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia all moved forward with plans designed to make it harder for blacks, Hispanics, and college students to vote. This tactic backfired on Republicans in 2012, and I think it will continue to backfire. Why? Seeing how hard it is for people-like-you to vote really convinces you that people-like-you need to vote. And Republican outreach to youth or Hispanics is doomed as long as the GOP targets those voting blocs as the Enemy.

The Prop 8 decision also had immediate effects: Plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier got married Friday.

As a liberal, I love the optics of all this. Conservative decisions lead to angry people stopping other people from voting. Liberal decisions lead to happy people celebrating a new chapter in their lives.

BTW, those anti-same-sex-marriage arguments you’ve been hearing on the talk shows are all bogus. ThinkProgress goes through them one-by-one so I don’t have to.

and immigration reform

The Senate passed a bill. Unfortunately, we have a bicameral system and the dysfunctional House still has to weigh in, so what happens next is anybody’s guess.

and massive demonstrations overseas

Egypt is the latest, but it’s not over yet in Brazil or Turkey either. In each country the demonstrations seem to be about something different, but the similarities of form are striking.

When I reviewed David Graeber’s The Democracy Project in the previous Sift, I was impressed by his observation that revolutions should be judged as “planetwide transformations of political common sense”, not by whether or not they take over the government. I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here. If so, the first people to grasp the new common sense will have a huge advantage.

and a lot of stuff that wasn’t worth your time

These last two weeks had such a large concentration of addictive stories-that-aren’t-really-news that simply ignoring them (as I usually do) didn’t seem sufficient. Instead, in Are You a “News” Addict? I explain why you shouldn’t waste your time on the Zimmerman trial, the search for Edward Snowden, Paula Deen, or Aaron Hernandez.

More people should have been talking about President Obama’s climate speech

Like so many things President Obama does, it was half a loaf. You could hope for more, but thank God we’re at least getting this much: He said clearly that climate change is happening and it’s time to act rather than argue with deniers. (“We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.”) He instructed the EPA to regulate the carbon pollution from existing power plants, rather than just new ones. (The Devil’s in the details there: What will the new regulations say?) He hinted something about the Keystone Pipeline, but didn’t say anything you could take to the bank. And he announced a number of smaller initiatives that look really good, but (you know) they’re small.

The text of the speech is here. Slate has a good article laying out what it means.

and this stuff is also worth a look

The IRS “scandal” isn’t quite dead yet, but it’s definitely on life support. The Benghazi “stand down” myth is also pretty well debunked at this point.

A fascinating study shows that when people are shown another person’s picture and asked to estimate how much pain that person would feel from a variety of mishaps (getting shampoo in their eyes, stubbing their toes, etc.) they consistently estimate black people’s pain lower than white people’s.

Why? First guess was racism, but then it turned out that blacks also imagine whites suffer more from similar events.

A better explanation seems to be a princess-and-the-pea theory: If you think someone has had a hard life, you believe they can “take it”, while more privileged people are seen as more sensitive. It’s like: “You’ve suffered? Then it’s no big deal if you suffer some more.”

Things I learned while driving from New Hampshire to Kentucky/Tennessee/North Carolina and back during my week off:

  • Louisville is a way cooler, more cosmopolitan city than my New-England-centered worldview had led me to believe. Check out the museum-hotel 21C or the NuLu district. (The 21C souvenir t-shirt says “I Slept With Art”.)
  • Another surprise about the upper South: good local Mexican restaurants close to the interstates. I never had to resort to McDonalds or Cracker Barrel.
  • The absolute best way to avoid boredom on a long drive is Public Radio Remix, which collects quirky human-interest stories (like this one) from public radio stations all over the country. XM channel 123, and also available on the web.

Let’s end with something fun

This online test measures how well you see color. I got a 15.

July 1, 2013 – 12:12 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

This Court Sucks

Whatever you think of the results, the majority opinions in both the Voting Rights Act and the DOMA cases are unworthy of the highest court in the land.

Sometimes I imagine that a judge is brilliant just because he or she agrees with me, or that judges are idiots when they don’t do what I want. That’s what made this week’s Supreme Court decisions so interesting for me.

On Tuesday the Court announced a decision whose result I thought was terrible (Voting Rights Act) and on Wednesday one I thought was great (Defense of Marriage Act). Reading the two back-to-back qualifies me to make the following non-partisan judgment: This Court sucks. Whether you love or hate the consequences, both decisions are awful pieces of legal reasoning.

Justice Kennedy’s DOMA decision. Let me start with the decision whose conclusion I like: DOMA. I’ve read all the major same-sex marriage decisions since 2003, and they are all structured the same way because they all hang on the same two issues:

  • Do laws discriminating against gays and lesbians deserve heightened scrutiny? Laws that single out a class of citizens for better or worse treatment can’t be arbitrary; some rational thought process needs to connect the discrimination to some legitimate goal of government. How good that reasoning needs to be depends on how likely it is that the law is based on simple bigotry. If a history of bigotry against the singled-out group makes that explanation seem very likely (as in race or gender cases), then the law faces some form of heightened scrutiny. At the lowest level of scrutiny, the law just needs to have some rational connection to some legitimate goal. At the highest level (strict scrutiny) the government has to have a very important goal, and the discrimination in the law has to be the minimal amount necessary to achieve it.So in a same-sex marriage case the first thing a judge needs to do is announce a standard of scrutiny: Does a history of bigotry against gays and lesbians make a law restricting their rights inherently suspect? How much so?
  • Do the justifications of the law in question meet that standard? If you want to uphold a law discriminating against same-sex couples, you announce a low standard of scrutiny and argue that the law’s justifications meet that standard. Conversely, a decision overturning a discriminatory law will announce a high standard and say that the law’s justifications don’t meet it. Really sweeping decisions, like the original 2003 Goodridge decision establishing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, say that the law can’t even meet the lowest standard, because treating same-sex couples differently has no rational relationship at all to any legitimate government goal.

For ten years, lower courts have been practically begging the Supremes to settle the level-of-scrutiny issue with respect to gays and lesbians. With that in mind, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion on DOMA reads like mush. When the decision was released, the initial commentary said he had defined a new standard, careful consideration. But that turned out to give him too much credit. Kennedy used the phrase, but when analysts had time to read more closely they saw that he must have meant it in its everyday sense, because he never defined it as a legal term. He just meant that he was considering carefully.

Gay-rights advocates (among whose ranks I count myself) love quoting from Kennedy’s opinion, because it is full of polemic sound-bites about “second-tier marriage” like:

The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558, and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.

Now that sounds really bad, but legally it amounts to nothing, because governments demean and humiliate people all the time. (I feel demeaned and humiliated when I have to take off my belt and shoes at the airport, and then let them blast me with radiation to make an image of my naked body.) The question is why they do it and how their reasons stack up against our rights.

Kennedy never lays that out. He lists many ways that DOMA disadvantages same-sex married couples, and then concludes:

The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State [of New York], by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.

That’s exactly the result I want, Justice Kennedy, but how did you get there? The purposes Congress imagined DOMA serving — whatever they were; you don’t list them or examine them — don’t “overcome”, but are they failing to overcome a high standard or a low standard? Or are you saying that Congress didn’t have a legitimate purpose at all, or even that none can be imagined after the fact? That would be really sweeping … if that’s what you’re saying. But who can tell?

As my high school algebra teacher used to say: “Show your work.” You’re an effing Supreme Court justice! You can’t just list a bunch of facts and then state a conclusion, as if the logic connecting them must be obvious to everybody.

Justice Roberts’ VRA decision. I was primed to find fault with Kennedy’s decision because just the day before Justice Roberts had published a similarly mushy decision tossing out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, and so making Section 5 meaningless. Roberts’ failures jumped out at me, because I disagree with his conclusion and think his decision will lead to major injustices.

Some quick background: After the Civil War, black men’s right to vote was established by the 14th and 15th amendments. (Black women got the right to vote at the same time white women did, with the 19th amendment in 1920.) During Reconstruction, blacks were a majority in several southern states, and many were elected to office. But after federal troops left the South in 1877, white paramilitary groups like the KKK intimidated black voters sufficiently for whites to regain control of state governments. That led to a series of laws and practices that effectively disenfranchised blacks.

The Supreme Court initially upheld such laws (to the shame of otherwise great justices like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.), but started over-ruling them in 1915. The legislative process works faster than the judicial process, though, so for half a century new disenfranchising laws were passed faster than courts could throw them out. Justice Roberts notes that at the time the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, only 6.4% of the black population of Mississippi was registered to vote.

The VRA [text] has two key provisions: Section 2 concisely restates the rights implied by the 15th amendment:

No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

And Section 5 says that areas with a history of disenfranchisement have to  pre-clear any changes in their voting laws with the Justice Department. Section 4 spells out how those areas are defined. Mostly that turns out to be southern states, but a few other places (including parts of my state of New Hampshire) have had to endure the Justice Department looking over their shoulders whenever they change voting laws.

But in essence, the VRA puts the South on probation. Initially that was for 5 years, but the term keeps getting renewed; most recently it was renewed for another 25 years in 2006.

That’s what Roberts has a problem with. Section 4 is based on evidence that was current in 1965, and the basic formula has barely changed since. In the same way that laws need to have a reason to discriminate between citizens, they have to have really good reasons to discriminate between states, which are assumed to have “equal sovereignty”.

Past Supreme Courts have weighed the VRA’s justifications and found them sufficient. Jim Crow was an exceptional problem that required an exceptional solution. (My personal opinion: If you’re going to make an exception, voting rights is a good place to make it, because once voting gets screwed up all the non-judicial ways our system corrects itself are screwed up too.) But Roberts notes that:

Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.

This is a point you’ll hear often in conservative circles. Nobody wants to explicitly defend Jim Crow any more, but that’s all ancient history. The Age of Obama is post-racial. Things have changed.

Roberts goes on at some length about how things have changed. Minority voter-registration rates are close to parity with white Anglos, and in some elections minority turnout is above average. Minority candidates now get elected to Congress in section-5 states like Texas or South Carolina.

In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics. Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were. … Congress—if it is to divide the States—must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions.

Of course, Robert’s characterization of the VRA is not exactly true, because it has a bail-out provision: States and counties can permanently escape section 5 by convincing a court that they’ve stopped trying to discriminate. Parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and New Hampshire have all successfully used that procedure. So a state’s failure to bail out is itself a “current condition”. The plaintiff, Shelby County, could not meet that condition, because it continues to try to disenfranchise blacks. (During oral arguments, Justice Kagan summed it up: “You’re objecting to the formula, but under any formula Congress could devise, it would capture Alabama.”)

But never mind all that, because even making that point draws us down the rabbit hole Roberts has dug. Here’s what’s important: “Things have changed” is not a legal argument. It’s a fine point to make on a blog or at a dinner party, but a Supreme Court justice has to do better than that.

If Roberts were being a real judge here, he’d spell out what “equal sovereignty” has and hasn’t meant in American legal history. He’d enunciate an abstract standard by which Jim Crow was “exceptional” in 1965 and which justified the steps taken then. He’d explain how that standard was violated by the renewal of the VRA in 2006. And he’d lay down a set of conditions that Congress would need to satisfy to make the VRA acceptable today. (If you want to see what a real legal opinion looks like, read Justice Ginsburg’s dissent. Whether you agree with her or not, she is clearly doing something far more rigorous than what Roberts is doing.)

Roberts doesn’t do any of that. The VRA was vaguely justified in 1965 and is vaguely unjustified now, because “things have changed”. If I were a congressman, I would have no idea how to revise the VRA so that it passes constitutional muster. If Congress does revise it, lower court judges who rule on it will just be guessing about its constitutionality. It will have to go back to the Supreme Court before anyone knows whether it’s really a law again, because there are no standards in Roberts’ opinion by which a revision can be judged.

This isn’t law. It’s politics. It’s mush.

So after “careful consideration” of how “things have changed”, this is my judgment: Whether you agree with its conclusions or not, this Court sucks.

July 1, 2013 – 11:15 am Categories: Articles | Comments (41)

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Are you a “news” addict?

Every week, the so-called “news” provided by 24/7 cable channels and their web sites includes a hefty helping of gossip: stuff you really don’t need to know that is designed to snag your attention. Worse, this kind of stuff is addictive; you can find yourself thinking about it when you’re supposed to be working or resting or listening to your spouse. Like any addict, your mind drifts into wondering when you’ll be able to turn on the TV or check the internet to get your next dose.

Believe me, I speak from experience. Back in the 90s, my attention got captured by addictive stories like the O. J. Simpson and the Microsoft antitrust trials. They seemed harmless at first, but before long my brain was not my own. They took mental cycles away from the important issues in my personal life, and from the issues that needed my attention as a citizen. Instead, my thoughts and emotions were focused on whatever CNN* decided to hype that week, stuff that usually had nothing to do with me.

One beautiful summer day I went to a peaceful park, imagining that I would work out the plot holes in a piece of fiction I’d been trying to write. Instead, I spent the time raging about Elian Gonzalez. That was when I knew I had a problem. I had to go cold turkey.

That’s why the Weekly Sift is the way it is. I designed it to be the informational equivalent of a coffee-and-juice bar for former alcoholics. You can hang out here, stay informed about the things a citizen needs to know, and never hear about the Casey Anthony trial. We can even talk politics without agonizing over whether Hillary is going to run again or not**.

Most weeks, providing that hype-free space feels like enough. But these last two weeks have seen such an enormous concentration of addictive not-news or almost-news stories that simply ignoring them doesn’t seem sufficient. (I had to listen to President Obama’s climate speech on C-SPAN, because CNN, Fox, and MSNBC all had junk news to cover instead.) Many of my regular readers, I suspect, have been captured by these stories, because it’s hard not to be. So this week I’m doing an intervention. If you’re obsessing over any of the stories below (or something similar), think about whether that’s the best use of your time, your mind, and your emotional energy.

As I said, I’ve been there, so I know how you want to respond: “OK, maybe I am spending too much time on this, but I enjoy it. What’s wrong with that?”

Alcoholics will tell you the same thing. They enjoy drinking. They enjoy barfing in your car. They enjoy waking up with a headache and not knowing how they got here.

Take a step back from your “enjoyment” of addictive stories and look at their larger effects. Do you really enjoy staying up until 2 a.m. to put the 400th comment on some internet article (because otherwise the 399th guy wouldn’t understand what a jerk he is)? When you finally leave the TV, are you happier than when you sat down in front of it? More relaxed? Better able to deal with the rest of your life?

Or have the gossip pushers gotten their hooks into you? Has your mind stopped being your own?

The Zimmerman trial. Trials are classic soap opera, but the only people who should devote day-by-day attention to them are defendants, jurors, and the lawyers and judges who are paid for their time. Everybody else should just wait to see how they come out. A typical day at a trial produces maybe a paragraph’s worth of new information, but that paragraph can take hours to unfold and then pundits can speculate endlessly about what tomorrow’s paragraph will say. Minus the 15 seconds it takes to read a paragraph, all that time is wasted.

The Zimmerman trial is particularly insidious, because you can almost convince yourself it’s news. The Trayvon Martin case as a whole is worth knowing about, because of what it says about racism in America. (So was O. J.’s case, if you could keep the long view and not develop an opinion about Kato Kaelin’s character.) That’s why I covered it twice last year (Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See and Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism). When the trial is over, it may be worth looking back to see how those social issues played out in this context. But don’t waste hours pondering the daily drip-drip-drip of information.

You don’t know George Zimmerman, and whether he spends 20 years in prison or walks away free has no effect on your life. So if you find yourself reacting emotionally to obscure points in the rules of evidence, consider the possibility that you may have a problem.

The Snowden chase. Like the Zimmerman trial, this spins out of a legitimate news story, but isn’t news. As I explained in the previous Sift, Edward Snowden is Not the Issue. So far, Snowden has told us a bunch of stuff about NSA spying that the government should have told us a long time ago. Why he did it, how he did it, where he is now, and whether he’ll make it to a country willing to grant him asylum — it’ll be a great movie someday, but it doesn’t matter. The Fourth Amendment matters; the NSA spying on innocent American citizens matters.

Paula Deen. This story contains a tiny sliver of some important issues: How much should we care about what TV stars do when they’re off camera? And if you imagined that racism was ancient history in America, well, clearly not.

But those issues came and went in a brief flicker. Now it’s about whether she’s been sufficiently contrite, and whether white people are persecuted by “reverse racism” or “political correctness” or some other nonsense. (I’ve already said everything I have to say about that in The Distress of the Privileged.)

If you never watched Deen’s show on the Food Network, then the story has no effect on you whatsoever. If you loved her show, don’t worry, she’ll have another one before long. Don Imus came back; so will Paula Deen.

Aaron Hernandez. I’m a Patriot fan, I’ve enjoyed watching Hernandez run after making a catch, and I still refuse to pay attention to this case. O. J.’s runs were even more fun to watch, but his murder trial took up a chunk of my life that I’ll never get back.

I’m going to continue to worry about whether Tom Brady will have anybody to throw to next season. But the Patriots have released Hernandez and the rest of us should too. A jury will decide whether he’s a murderer. The rest of us don’t need to have an opinion.

What is news anyway? News is a recent or ongoing public event that affects you either in your personal life or in your role as a citizen. You could imagine doing something about news. If it’s large-scale news, it might change how you vote or cause you to contact your elected representatives. Maybe you’ll write a check or attend a demonstration or organize to help the victims. Or maybe you won’t end up doing any of those things, but you could, because the story affects your life.

Smaller-scale news concerns stuff you might do in your personal life: a new restaurant is opening, the highway is under construction, 4th of July fireworks will be somewhere different this year.

Sometimes news changes your perspective or opens your eyes to wonder. Apollo 17’s Big Blue Marble photo was news.

Addictive gossip raises the same do-something feelings as a war or a famine, but since it doesn’t really touch any part of your life, all you can “do” is invest more energy in the story itself. So you learn more details, form more opinions about the characters, speculate about what might happen next, and generally just get more and more wound up. Perversely, you end up more motivated to do something — but there’s nothing you can do — than you feel in response to personal and political situations that are crying out for your action.

Worst of all, the addictive story gives you a chance to keep repeating all those maxims that make you unhappy and prevent you from achieving your potential: The world is rigged against people like you, nasty people are everywhere, justice never really triumphs. Maybe your negative maxims are different, but you know what they are.

Take a step back and look around. Are you really enjoying this? If you never thought about it again, would it ever come back to bite you?

Let it go. There’s a world out there that needs your attention.

* The Fox/MSNBC shouting match hadn’t developed yet. It was a simpler time.

** It’ll be fine. Either way, there will be someone worth voting for, at least in the primaries. Trust me on this.

July 1, 2013 – 8:52 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The Sift returns today after taking last week off.

It’s been an eventful two weeks: The Supreme Court term ended its term with some major decisions and President Obama announced his climate-change plan. But as I drove thousands of miles and listened to the satellite-radio audio of the TV news networks, I was struck by how hard it was sometimes to get any real news at all. Instead, coverage was often dominated by stories that were basically soap opera or gossip: Paula Deen, the search for Edward Snowden, or the painfully slow drip-drip-drip of information from the George Zimmerman trial. I had to listen to Obama’s climate speech on C-SPAN, because the other networks thought they had better things to cover.

My original motive to do something like the Weekly Sift comes from a period in the 90s when I suffered from what I came to call “CNN addiction”. I got obsessed with whatever the hyped “news” story of the day was — O. J. Simpson, Elian Gonzalez, and so on — to the point that I had trouble focusing on the things that I actually needed to think about.

That’s why the Sift filters that stuff out and tries to present just the news that actually does deserve your attention. Normally it’s enough just to ignore the other stuff, but there’s so much of it around right now that I feel the need to do an intervention. So this week’s first article — it should appear within the next hour — is “Are you a ‘news’ addict?”.

The other featured article will be a sober, dispassionate analysis of the Supreme Court’s DOMA and Voting Rights Act decisions called “This Court Sucks”. Reading those two poorly justified decisions on consecutive days — one that I agreed with and one that I didn’t — convinced me that it’s not just my liberal bias talking: The Roberts Court really does suck. Both Roberts and Kennedy wrote political mush that has no business calling itself a legal decision. Scalia’s DOMA dissent was a temper tantrum that should embarrass our entire judiciary. The only opinion in the batch that sounded like a judge writing about the law was Ginsburg’s dissent on the VRA decision.

The weekly summary will look at the impact of those decisions, Obama’s climate announcement, the immigration bill, Obama “scandals” that continue to fizzle out, the best radio station for passing the time on a long drive, and some other stuff I thought was fun.

July 1, 2013 – 7:48 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Dissidents

No Sift next week. The next articles will be posted on July 1.

At the hands of the press,
and in the eyes of the Government,
I fell from grace.
I too became a dissident.

— Thomas Dolby, “Dissidents” (lyrics, audio)

This week everybody was talking about Edward Snowden

And that misses the point. If you’re talking about Snowden — whether he’s a hero or a traitor, why he did it, what should happen to him, etc. — then you’re not talking about the NSA, what it’s doing, and what should be done to corral it.

The NSA loves that.

So no matter how many bright shiny objects the establishment press tries to distract you with — look! his girl friend is a pole dancer! — keep your eye on the ball. The issue that matters is the NSA, not Snowden. I flesh those ideas out, and cover what else we learned about the NSA this week, in Edward Snowden Is Not the Issue.

You know who does do a good job of laying out the issues? Juice Rap News.

and Syria

The Obama administration has become convinced that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons against the rebels. And governments can’t be allowed to do that, so we have to do something. But that doesn’t mean we know what to do, or how not to get sucked into another long war with nothing to win.

The British newspaper The Independent reports that Iran is sending 4,000 members of its Revolutionary Guard to help Assad. It frames Obama’s move to arm the rebels as the U.S. taking sides in the region-wide sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shia.

Foreign Policy explains why the Pentagon has been dragging its feet on intervention.

With some notable exceptions, top brass believe arming Syrian rebels, creating a no-fly zone and intervening in other ways militarily, amounts to a risky approach with enormous costs that won’t likely give the Syrian opposition the lift it needs.

And at that point do we say, “Oh well, at least we tried.”? Or do we have to go in deeper to justify what we’ve done already?

and Turkey

Turkish protestors make Les Miserables their own. I wish that didn’t fill me with foreboding.

I can’t say I really understand what the Turkish protests are about, but this article helps.

and DNA patents

Maybe my cynicism level has gotten too high. I was sure that a few of the corporatist justices on the Supreme Court would figure out a way to justify granting patents on naturally-occurring human DNA; I wouldn’t have been totally shocked if that view had won a 5-4 majority. Eventually, I figured, some mega-corp will patent lungs and charge the rest of us royalties for breathing.

Didn’t happen.

Instead, Thursday the Court unanimously decided that “separating [a] gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention” and is therefore not patentable. The decision specifically applied to Myriad Genetics’ claim of a patent on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes implicated in breast cancer. Because of those patents, Myriad had a monopoly on testing for those genes and was able to charge high prices. (Angelina Jolie launched those tests into the headlines a few weeks ago by having her apparently healthy breasts removed after seeing her results.)

But I wrote about Apocalyptic Optimism

It’s easy to be an optimist if you think the right people are in power and have things more-or-less in hand. But Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? and David Graeber’s The Democracy Project are upbeat books by people who think our current system is falling apart.

and how to make the NSA’s job harder

I try out some simple anonymizing tools in Herd Immunity Against Online Spying.

and these things also caught my eye

The usual Brewer/Obama relationship.

In one of the year’s most fascinating political surprises, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (famous for the anti-immigrant “papers please” law S. B. 1070) succeeded in pushing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion through the legislature. Brewer had begun carrying out her threat to veto every bill until Medicaid expansion passed.

300,000 Arizonans will now get health insurance. The Medicaid expansion is important because it rationalizes healthcare for the working poor. Currently, many of them wait until health problems get out of hand, then go to the emergency room, generating huge bills they can’t pay. Some of those costs are absorbed by the hospitals (who make it up by overcharging the rest of us), and some costs eventually are borne by cities and states. Since the cost of Medicaid expansion is largely borne by the federal government, Arizona saves money by agreeing to it.

Nate Silver says the odds of a second Massachusetts Senate upset are slim.

Undoubtedly some everyday sexual harassment — pinching, grabbing, leering, etc. — is done with conscious malice. But I suspect most harassers have just never tried to imagine what being on the receiving side is really like. So they think: “It’s a game”, “women expect it”, “it’s no big deal”, “they should be flattered”, and so on. Well, for those guys, there’s this video:

Parody news sites are getting harder to spot. They’re more subtle than they used to be, and the level of craziness in real news keeps going up. So newslo.com fools quite a few people with stories like Texas Board of Education Revises Textbooks: Slaves were “Unpaid Interns”.

Every news-satire site should adopt Newslo’s help feature: the Show Facts button at the bottom of each story. Clicking it highlights the parts of the story that are true.

After another Republican man says something stupid about rape, Ta-Nehisi Coates comments on the value of diversity:

If you are not around people who will look at you like you are crazy when you make stupid claims about other people’s experiences, then you tend to keep saying stupid things about other people’s experiences.

Diversity in positions of power isn’t just a kumbaya thing or a way to buy off politically important minorities. If you’re about to embarrass yourself, your party, or your country by saying something stupid about (or doing something stupid to) people you don’t understand, a diverse leadership group has ways of shutting that whole thing down.

Ah, the perverse state government of Scott Walker’s Wisconsin. While the legislature has been in the process of passing one of those war-on-women forced-ultrasound laws, the amount of dissent tolerated in the galleries has been shrinking. Thursday they hit a new low: Women who protested by putting duct tape over their mouths were removed from the gallery. Somebody want to explain to me again how conservatism is all about freedom?

June 17, 2013 – 10:58 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)