Here’s my hope for the Boston Marathon bombing: Maybe it can mark the end of the 9-11 Era. It feels so different from 9-11. Maybe it can exorcize the demons that have haunted us these last dozen years.
9-11 was a wound that refused to heal. I think that had something to do with the kind of story it was and the way we told it: It was a tragedy, and the many heroic individual stories that came out of 9-11 just served to make the larger story that much more tragic.
The greatest heroes of 9-11 all died. They were the first responders who charged up the burning towers only to be crushed in the collapse. They were the passengers of United Flight 93, who crashed their own plane rather than let it become a bomb. We could not identify with them or feel connected to their courage, because we lived. To have survived on a day when the real heroes died … it felt almost shameful.
The villains — the men who hijacked the airliners and slammed them into the Twin Towers — were likewise dead. They died on their own terms, as martyrs and victors in their own eyes, and they were beyond our reach now.
So in spite of all the people who did the best they could that day, the overwhelming emotions of 9-11 were shame, depression, anger, and fear. As a country, America came out of 9-11 looking for somebody to blame, and wanting to mess them up as badly as we could.
We could not let the story end this way, so we took it to Afghanistan and Iraq. We took it to Bagram and Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. If some of the people we killed or maimed or tortured were innocent, so be it. Collateral damage. Our people had been innocent too.
9-11 was a monstrous act that we couldn’t resolve in our hearts, so it turned us into monsters.*
But we will tell the Boston Marathon bombing story as a challenge that Americans rose to. Not years later in another country, but as it was happening. Not by dying or killing, but by living and saving lives. This time, the tragedy sets up the stories of heroism, not the other way around.
It started immediately, with the ordinary people, the runners and their friends and families, who raced into danger to help the wounded. But unlike the 9-11 first responders, they did not become martyrs or victims. They continue to walk among us like the typical Americans they are.
EMTs and police were already present at the finish line, and their performance will be a model for the rest of the world for years to come. Their story is a victory, not a tragedy. It is a tribute to them that only three people died on the scene.
Everyone who made it into an ambulance is still alive a week later, because hundreds more nurses and doctors became heroes by saving lives, not by dying or by taking lives in revenge. Like the runners and the EMTs, they did not vanish into a martyr’s Heaven, but melted back into the general population. Maybe you pass them on the highway or stand in line with them at the supermarket. Maybe you are one of them.
Our leaders expressed sorrow, promised justice, and asked for our cooperation. They got it. People sent in their photos, and studied photos taken by others. Asked to stay off the streets or keep to their homes, we did.
Police swarmed in from all over the area, and worked together under federal leadership without visible rancor. They did their jobs, protecting the public without becoming our masters. They did not create more victims by rounding up hundreds of innocents. A policeman died, a fourth victim, but no more civilians.
And they caught the bad guys. One died in a suburban shootout that miraculously killed no bystanders. The other was wounded, but managed to hide for most of the next day. He was found by a citizen who did not kill or get himself killed. He called the police, who captured the suspect alive and took him to a hospital.
That night, the convoy of police leaving Watertown became a spontaneous victory parade, and the citizens (who had been cooped up in their houses all day) streamed out onto the streets to cheer.
Unlike 9-11, it was over.
This time, like the aid-giving marathoners, like the EMTs, like the hundreds of doctors and nurses and police, at least one perpetrator will live and not become a martyr larger than life. We may get what we never had for 9-11: an explanation and a motive. We may come to look on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as a troubled teen-ager, rather than a demon we see whenever we close our eyes and keep trying to kill by projecting him onto others.
Along the way, we may exorcize another demon who has haunted us too long: the Terrorist Superman, who desires nothing but mayhem and can be stopped by nothing but death. Who requires superhuman security measures and inhuman methods of interrogation. The monster who can only be fought by other monsters.
And that forms the essence of my hope: Maybe the events of this week have shown us that we don’t have to be monsters any more.
Maybe we can just be people who help other people, workers who save lives by doing our jobs, citizens who respect our authorities and get respect in return. Maybe we can seek justice without losing our human compassion. Maybe we can stand for values higher than mere survival. Maybe we can once again be part of a nation that is admired rather than just feared.
9-11 will never be forgotten, but I think it is time for it to be over. Maybe now it can join the Kennedy assassination and Pearl Harbor and the other great sorrowful events of our history. A scar, a memory, but not a wound.
So this is my post-marathon-bombing hope: That now we can stop being the frightened, angry, shamed survivors of 9-11 and go back to being Americans. It’s been a long time.
* In an earlier version of this article that I posted on Daily Kos, some commenters were inclined to absolve everyday Americans and put the blame on President Bush. I’m not going to make excuses for Bush, but he didn’t create the widespread post-9-11 desire for violence, he just channeled it. By the time the Iraq invasion rolled around, I and many other people were opposed. But I definitely felt the fear and anger it was based on.
It’s been one of those weeks: At last count, 14 people were dead and dozens still missing in the Texas fertilizer explosion, and that event could barely stay on the front page with all the Boston coverage.
The Sift isn’t a breaking-news kind of blog, so my coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing is to take a step back and wonder what it might mean to the country long-term. The thing that stands out to me is how the narrative hooks of 9-11 got reversed: In 9-11, heroism set the stage for greater tragedy, symbolized by the first responders who charged up the burning tower and died when it collapsed. In Boston, the initial tragedy set the stage for greater heroism.
So I wonder if Boston can be the first step in undoing some of the mistakes we justified by pointing to 9-11. And so the first featured article this week is: “Maybe 9-11 Can Be Over Now”.
The second featured article is longer, because the topic is more complicated. In “Why the Austerity Fraud Matters” I try to explain why you should care about an academic dispute between economists: The case for focusing on the national debt rather than unemployment is based on a highly influential paper that is simply a fraud.
That doesn’t leave much space for a weekly summary, but there’s still that Texas thing to deal with. And the Senate siding with the NRA over the American people.
This week everybody was talking about Margaret Thatcher’s life and death
The Iron Lady hasn’t been prime minister since 1990, so you might think the old wounds would have scabbed over by now. Apparently not. After Thatcher’s death was announced, “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” went to #1 on iTunes-UK. Not to defend her, but do I have to point out how sexist that is? If she were male, maybe opponents could be satisfied with Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down“.
When her death was falsely reported in 2008 and plans for a 3-million-pound state funeral came out, Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle commented:
For 3 million, they could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we would dig a hole so deep that we could hand her over to Satan personally.
To put her impact in American terms, Thatcher was the anti-FDR. By the time she left office, the union-dominated Britain of the 1970s was as hard to remember as the Roaring Twenties were when Roosevelt died in office in 1945.
She inspired the Reagan Revolution in the US, and symbolized the plutocratic and plutolatric trends that today make the US and the UK (plus Italy, for some reason) the rich countries with the greatest inequality and the least economic mobility.
I guess that’s hard to forget.
and taxes
It’s April 15, time for my annual attempt to popularize the term work penalty — the extra tax you pay because you work for a living rather than having money that works for you: How Big Was Your Work Penalty in 2012?
Of course, we can’t tax wealthy heirs, and we can’t tax their dividend or capital gain income because … well, just because. They’re “job creators” or something. There’s a word for this, plutolatry. It usually means “worship of wealth”, but it could also mean “worship of the rich”. I’m looking for ways to work it into conversations, like I did in the previous section.
Another Tax Day point worth making: Americans would save a lot of time and money if the IRS would use the information it has and just mail us a bill. If your tax situation was simple, you could pay the bill and be done with it, but if you wanted to itemize or claim some complicated tax break, you could file a return the way you do now.
Why doesn’t that happen? Two reasons: The tax-prep industry makes money from the current arrangement, so they lobby Congress to keep things the way they are. And anti-tax conservatives want Tax Day to be painful so that the public will resent paying taxes.
and Obama’s budget
which included a proposal to figure the cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security using the stingier chained CPI. I discuss this in Four Things I Know About Social Security. #3 is “Chained CPI is a way to cut Social Security benefits, not a way to measure inflation more accurately.”
and (oddly) a C&W song
For some reason I haven’t fathomed, this week all sorts of people were moved to comment on Brad Paisley’s new song “Accidental Racist” (performed with black rapper L L Cool J). The song has a why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along theme, but annoys blacks and liberals by (among other things) making a false equivalence between whites judging a black man by his gold-chain bling and blacks not forgiving whites for the iron chains their ancestors wore.
In my terminology, Paisley is expressing privileged distress: His song’s main character (never assume a song is autobiographical) suffers because blacks now feel empowered enough to object to racist crap (like a confederate-flag t-shirt) that he used to get away with. He then imagines that his suffering is comparable to what blacks suffer from racism, so he’s ready to call it even and wipe the slate clean.
While we’re on the subject of racial cluelessness, Rand Paul spoke at historically black Howard University. Paul treated the Republican Party’s dismal performance among black voters as some of kind of mystery. He reviewed the party’s stellar racial record from Lincoln through the 1950s, and then skipped completely over the last 50 years, when Republicans courted the racist Dixiecrats who were leaving the Democratic Party after it embraced the Civil Rights movement. (Charles Blow filled in that history for Paul. I reviewed it in detail in December.)
You can’t just yada yada yada the last 60 Republican years: “A Republican freed the slaves, gave black people the vote, yada yada yada, and now all blacks vote Democratic. I mean, what the hell?”
Josh Marshall commented on Paul’s shock that his audience already knew the history he was trying to tell them and still wasn’t sold:
When you look at who’s the bamboozled and who’s the bamboozler in this part of the GOP subculture you see that it’s not so clear cut. … The GOP is so deep into its own self-justifying racial alternative reality that there’s some genuine surprise when the claptrap doesn’t survive first contact with actual black people.
and you also might be interested in …
An unplanned consequence of putting armed police in public schools: Incidents that used to send you to the principal’s office now send you to court. The NYT reports:
Joshua, a ninth grader who lives south of Houston, got into a brief fight on a school bus in November after another boy, a security video showed, hit him first. The principal called in the school’s resident sheriff, who wrote them both up for disorderly conduct.
Charges were eventually dismissed, but Joshua had to find a lawyer and miss class for two court appearances. “I thought it was stupid,” he said.
Harvard’s Jal Mehta proposes a really radical change in education policy: Train teachers rigorously and well, and then let them do what they’re paid to do.
Show this to the next person who tells you about “liberal media bias” on climate change.
Number of climate scientists participating in discussion: zero.
Yet another sad story about a teen rape victim getting hounded by her peers.
You’ve got to wonder if this is finally the right place for a “Just Say No” approach. As we saw in the Steubenville case, a lot of teen guys seem not to realize (at least not until after the fact) that it’s wrong to take advantage of a girl who can’t resist. That’s why I like this video:
Stephen Moore shouted this popular-but-bogus claim (over Bernie Sanders’ objections) on the April 5 episode of Real Time with Bill Mahr. It’s a common conservative talking point often put forward in publications like the Washington Times.
2020 is when the Social Security is projected to start paying out more than it takes in. (It already pays out more than it collects in taxes, but interest will make up the difference until 2020, according to the current Trustees’ Report.) This has to do with the retirement of the baby-boomers, and has been foreseen for decades. (If you’re a baby-boomer with an IRA, at some point you plan to start taking money out rather than putting money in. You don’t become bankrupt at that moment.) That’s why Social Security has been taking in more than it paid out since it was reformed by President Reagan and a Democratic Congress in 1983. (Then, the Social Security Trust Fund was only months away from hitting zero.) That’s how the Social Security Trust Fund accumulated its $2.7 trillion surplus.
The claims Moore shouted were “That money’s been spent already.” and “You can’t spend the same money twice.” He’s referring to the fact that the government-as-a-whole has not been building up a surplus (other than briefly at the end of the Clinton administration), so what the SSTF holds is not a stash of dollars or a pile of gold, but U.S. government bonds. In other words, the SSTF loaned its surplus to the rest of the government, which spent it. This has been demagogued as “raiding the trust fund” and somehow is supposed to make the whole idea of the SSTF illegitimate.
But nobody applies that logic to any other situation. When private pension funds hold big chunks of their assets in U.S. government bonds, or when individuals have government bonds in their IRAs, that’s considered the safest possible investment; nobody claims the money is “already spent”. Ditto for corporate bonds. Hasn’t the corporation “already spent” that money too? Or bank CDs — that money isn’t sitting in the vault; the bank loaned it to people who “already spent” it by starting businesses or building houses.
In short, “you can’t spend the same money twice” is flim-flam, and Stephen Moore and the Washington Times know it. (That’s why Moore had to shout. If people examine what he’s saying calmly and rationally, they’ll see through it.) The SSTF is holding $2.7 trillion in the safest possible investments. That stash will keep increasing until 2020, when the program will begin to tap it the way President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill pictured back in 1983.
2. It’s not a “Ponzi scheme”.
Shortly after World War I, Charles Ponzi opened an investment company that promised large returns from a murky investment strategy, and his early investors seemed to get the returns he promised. That drew in more investors, who also got big returns, and so on.
The secret was that Ponzi was using the new investments to pay the returns to the current investors, creating the appearance of profits that didn’t exist. Bernie Madoff used the same trick just a few years ago. Both schemes collapsed, as such schemes eventually must, because they require more and more investors to keep going.
In an ideal Ponzi scheme, the schemer disappears with the money at precisely the moment when investors start trying to cash out, but neither Ponzi nor Madoff was able to time it correctly. Both went to jail.
Calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” (as Rick Perry and other conservatives have done) is a pejorative way to point out something everybody knows: The program relies on current workers paying taxes in order to finance the pensions of retirees. If the economy collapsed to the point that no one could pay taxes, the SSTF would drain out and benefit payments would stop. (Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano presented these well-publicized facts as if they were some top-secret revelation.)
But the differences dwarf the resemblances:
Social Security has no schemer who plans to run away with the money.
The finances are public. Everyone can see what is happening.
It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme that appeals to people’s greed. It’s a social contract between generations that appeals to our desires to (i) not let our elders starve, and (ii) not starve when we get old.
The assumptions Social Security depends on are a continued healthy economy and continued faith in the social contract. A Ponzi scheme depends on an exponentially growing pool of suckers that eventually has to exceed the population of the world.
Consequently, a Ponzi scheme inevitably collapses, at great loss to the last round of investors. Social Security can keep going as long as its two underlying assumptions hold.
In short, anybody who refers to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme is just trying to piss people off, and has no intention of discussing the program seriously.
3. Chained CPI is a way to cut Social Security benefits, not a way to measure inflation more accurately.
Chained consumer price index is an alternative to the consumer price index (CPI), which is how the government measures inflation for purposes like the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in Social Security. The original selling point for chained CPI was that it is a more accurate measure of inflation, because it allows for the way that people change their decisions as prices change. That’s the point made in this video by Fix the Debt (a “non-partisan” billionaire-funded organization that coincidentally wants “lower tax rates” that increase the debt, but benefit billionaires).
Chained CPI produces with a slightly lower measure of inflation, which results in lower COLAS than the CPI we use now, and — given time and the magic of compound interest — substantially lowers Social Security benefits down the road. Those lower benefits happen gradually, so we can tell ourselves it will be painless for the elderly.
We can also tell ourselves that it won’t “cut” benefits. As the FtD video says:
Benefits won’t be reduced, they’ll continue to grow over time, and they’ll do so more accurately. Furthermore, what the critics aren’t seeing is that the current system pays everyone more than it intends to. So instead of overpaying everyone, perhaps it makes more sense to focus on the people that need the additional help.
Here’s the problem with that: If you really wanted Social Security COLAs to be “accurate”, you’d base them not on the basket of goods and services tracked by either the CPI or the chained CPI, but on the goods and services seniors actually need and buy (i.e., fewer baby diapers and more adult diapers). Economist Dean Baker explains:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has constructed an experimental elderly index (CPI-E) which reflects the consumption patterns of people over age 62. This index has shown a rate of inflation that averages 0.2-0.3 percentage points higher than the CPI-W.
The main reason for the higher rate of inflation is that the elderly devote a larger share of their income to health care, which has generally risen more rapidly in price than other items. It is also likely that the elderly are less able to substitute between goods, both due to the nature of the items they consume and their limited mobility, so the substitutions assumed in the chained CPI might be especially inappropriate for the elderly population.*
While the CPI-E is just an experimental index, if the concern is really accuracy, then the logical route to go would be for the BLS to construct a full elderly CPI.
So the CPI-calculated COLAs have probably been too low, not too high. Rather than “overpaying everyone”, we’ve been letting inflation slowly whittle Social Security benefits away. Switching to chained CPI allows inflation to whittle faster.
If the way we want to reduce the deficit is by cutting Social Security benefits gradually over time, let’s argue that case on its merits. Let’s not kid ourselves about “more accurate” measures of inflation.**
4. We could keep the program solvent far into the future by raising the cap on taxed wages.
Unless you’re in the the upper or upper-middle class, you may not realize that not all wages are subject to the Social Security tax. In 2012, any wages over $110,100 were not charged Social Security tax. As a result (according to economist John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute), 6% of wage-earners exceed the cap, and because some of them exceed it by quite a bit, the percentage of income untaxed by Social Security is much larger and growing:
Due to growing income inequality, the share of earnings above the cap has risen from 10 percent in 1982 to over 16 percent in 2006. This is because incomes have grown strongly at the top while middle incomes have stagnated.
This trend is expected to continue, meaning that a growing share of earnings will remain outside the tax base.
The cap also means that higher-income individuals pay a smaller share of their income in Social Security taxes than middle-class employees. Including the employee and employer shares of Social Security and Medicare taxes, earners in the middle fifth of the income distribution pay an average effective payroll tax of about 11 percent. In contrast, the top 1 percent of earners pay just 1.5 percent on average.
… According to the Social Security Administration, fully eliminating the cap on taxable earnings would be sufficient to fully close the projected shortfall.
* People who talk about changing your buying habits have clearly not dealt with any actual seniors. When doctors suggested my 89-year-old father was developing a peanut-butter allergy, I bought him jars of soy and almond butter to try instead. While cleaning out his cabinets after he went to a nursing home, I found them unopened.
** I wouldn’t tie benefits to inflation at all. I’d tie them to the median wage.
The screwiest thing about the American tax system is its work penalty: If you earn your money by working, you may well be paying higher taxes than somebody who makes the same amount of money without working, via dividends or capital gains. You’re certainly not paying less.
A simple example shows what I’m talking about: Suppose a single person has $40,000 of taxable income. (That’s the amount on line 43 of the 1040 or line 6 of 1040EZ; in other words, you’ve already subtracted all your exemptions and deductions and you’re down to the amount you take to the tax table to figure out what you owe.) If s/he got that income without lifting a finger, say by letting dividends and capital gains distributions accumulate in a brokerage account, then the federal income tax bill is $6,000. (15%, in other words.)
But if that money came from working for wages, then the bill is $36 higher: $6036. So our hypothetical worker pays a $36 penalty for working rather than living idly off investment income.
The simple work penalty. That may not sound like much — unless any work penalty riles you as much as it riles me — but so far we’re just talking about the simple work penalty; as you’ll see, it gets worse the more things we take into account.
Here’s how you figure your simple work penalty: Multiply your taxable income by 15% to see what you’d pay if you made that money without working, then check your tax return to see how much you paid. (Or look up your income on the tax tables that start on page 79 of the 1040 instructions.) We’ve already seen that a simple work penalty starts at $40,000 for single people. It starts at $53,500 for a head of household or $80,000 for a joint-filing married couple.
No matter how little you make, you will never pay less than the idle guy who made the same amount from investments. When he figures his tax (on, say, the worksheet in the Schedule D instructions), one of the last lines has him figure how much he’d pay if he just used the regular tax tables like you do. If that amount is less, that’s what he owes.
Even the simple work penalty turns into real money if your wages are high. Say you’re a salesman working on commission and you had a really good year: Your taxable income is $100,000. If you’re single, you owe Uncle Sam $21,460. But the idle guy with $100,000 of taxable income from dividends and capital gains is still just paying 15%, or $15,000*. You’re penalized $6,460 because you made your money by working.
It gets worse. Anybody who has money to invest knows that the game is rigged even worse than that, because investors don’t owe any capital gains tax until they sell the thing that increased in value. So if an investor doesn’t want to pay tax, he just doesn’t sell.
Again, an example makes it real: Suppose a guy bought $10,000 of stock in Walgreens back in 1990 when it was selling at (a split-adjusted price of) $2.75. Ignore the dividends he’s been making all those years; the value of the shares themselves has gone up more than 17 times, so his 10K is now worth $177,300, making a gain of $167,300. How much tax has he paid on that gain over the last 23 years? Zero, because he hasn’t sold. If he never sells, and his heirs sell when they inherit, the tax is never paid. Even if he does sell and pay his 15% eventually, it doesn’t even out, because his money has been compounding tax-free all those years.
And what about payroll taxes? Payroll taxes apply to wages, but not to investment income. In general, wage-earners pay 1.45% of their wages in Medicare taxes and 4.2% in Social Security taxes**, for a total of 5.67%.
If you think of all that as just “taxes”, as money hoovered up by the government never to be seen again, then the work penalty is much higher. Let’s go back to our single guy with $40,000 of taxable income. Say he took the standard deduction of $5950 and had no dependents other than himself, so he had $3800 of exemptions. So his gross wages were somewhere around $49,750 and he paid $2821 in payroll taxes. The investor paid zero, so that would make the gross work penalty $2857 — a much bigger chunk of change than the $36 simple work penalty. (Under the same assumptions, the $100K worker makes $109,750 gross and pays $6223 in payroll taxes, raising his gross work penalty to $12683.)
But that’s not really the right way to think about it, because some payroll taxes are social insurance payments that you will see direct benefit from. Unless you’re planning to have a fatal accident before you get old, paying money into Social Security now increases the benefits you will receive later, because (in spite of what conservatives tell you) Social Security is not going away. So the investor pays less Social Security tax than you, but he’ll also see less benefit down the road.
The same may not be true of Medicare, though, because it has all-or-nothing eligibility. In order to get coverage after 65, either you or your spouse has to pay into the program for ten years. After that, you get no additional coverage for paying in more.
So that 1.45% in Medicare taxes you paid in 2012 may well be garnering you no additional benefits over the non-paying investor (if, say, either or both of you already have your ten years in). So I think it’s entirely legitimate to include that in what we might call an adjusted work penalty. If we do, then the $40K worker pays a $757 work penalty and the $100K worker’s penalty is $8051.
By that definition, all workers, no matter how little they make, pay an adjusted work penalty. The investor with the same income will never pay a higher amount of income tax, and the worker pays an additional 1.45% in Medicare tax that may provide him/her no additional benefits down the road.
So suppose you work 30 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, at the $7.25 minimum wage, and you’ve been working for ten years or more. You have gross wages of $11,310. An investor whose only income is $11,310 of dividends and capital gains pays the same income tax you do, and in addition you pay $164 of Medicare taxes that provide you no additional benefit.
End the work penalty. Is that crazy or what? Why does our tax system penalize people for working rather than idly collecting dividends or sitting around owning things that go up in value?
Conservatives are always talking about ways to make the tax system “fairer”, by which they usually mean “flatter” — they want to lower the tax rates paid by people who make the highest wages. (Why that is “fairer” is a mystery to me. I think a progressive tax system is fair.)
But eliminating the simple work penalty absolutely would make the system fairer: Stop treating different kinds of income differently. Wages, dividends, capital gains — they’re all income. Tax them the same. And beyond that, why not tax investment income for Social Security and Medicare?
* I know what you’re thinking: Wouldn’t the alternate minimum tax kick the investor’s taxes up? No, it wouldn’t. The AMT counter-acts excessive deductions and tax-free income, but doesn’t affect the advantages of dividends and capital gains.
** Until their wage income hits $110,100. In 2012, earnings higher than that paid no additional Social Security tax. The 4.2% was a special rate for 2012, temporarily reduced from the ordinary 6.2% (matched by another 6.2% from the employer).
It’s Tax Day, so it’s time to ask the annual question: “How big was your work penalty in 2012?”
As you may already know, investment income like dividends and capital gains is taxed at a flat 15% rate, which is lower than the rates paid by many people who work for wages. Plus, payroll taxes don’t apply to investment income, and there are a number of other advantages.
Usually, this gets described in terms of the virtues of investment: capital formation, job creation, and so on. But once upon a time, work was considered virtuous too. So I prefer to describe this situation as a work penalty. You pay more tax because you work for a living rather than watching your money work for you.
The simple version of the work penalty is not hard to figure if you have your 1040 handy, and if more people knew their work penalty, we might raise enough outrage to do away with it.
Obama’s budget has put Social Security back in the news, so the second featured article is “Three things I know about Social Security”.
In the weekly summary, everybody was also talking about Margaret Thatcher and (for some reason I can’t fathom) a country-western song.
Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.
These last few weeks everybody was talking about same-sex marriage
which was argued before the Supreme Court. (Full transcript and audio at NPR.) More specifically, the Court is considering the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (which tells the federal government not to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in the states that allow them) and California’s Proposition 8 (which made same-sex marriage illegal in California by constitutional amendment).
There’s been an element of triumphalism in the liberal coverage of the hearings, as it became clear in the verbal arguments that the pro-DOMA, anti-marriage-equality side is really straining to find any legal-sounding fig leaf to justify its position.*
This lack of a leg to stand on vindicates Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall’s ground-breaking opinion in 2003 (the first case I ever blogged about). Marshall wrote that a same-sex marriage ban had “no rational relationship” to any legitimate goal of the state. At the time, conservatives were greatly offended by the implication that they were irrational, but now that they have to spell out that rational relationship, all they can do is huff and puff.
The other reason to feel triumphant is the parade of Democratic politicians flipping to support marriage equality. Arguably, the recent trend started with Joe Biden, who seemed to be pushing President Obama last May. (Obama got on board a few days later.) In the last month, Bill Clinton renounced DOMA, which he signed, and Hillary Clinton has also endorsed marriage equality. Every day or two, a new Democratic senator joined the chorus, until last Monday there were just eight Democratic senators who have not. Wait, make that seven. No, six. Sorry, four: Manchin of West Virginia, Pryor of Arkansas, Landrieu of Louisiana, and Johnson of South Dakota. All are from states Obama lost handily in 2012, and all but Manchin are up for re-election in 2014.
This is all in line with my post “Everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030” last May. The trends are clear and politicians of both parties can read them. So Biden jumped before Obama because Obama focused only on the 2012 general election, while Biden was also looking at the 2016 Democratic primaries. Claire McCaskill flipped because she doesn’t run again until 2018, by which time the issue will work in her favor, even in Missouri.
It will be a few elections before that logic takes hold on the Republican side, but by 2030, even Republican candidates for local offices in Alabama won’t take an openly anti-gay position and expect to win on it, just as they don’t take openly racist positions now.
The religious right is not folding, though, and this sets up a libertarian vs. theocrat battle that will probably divide the Republican party for years to come. Libertarians and corporatist Republicans will want to play the issue down to win elections, while theocrats will be looking for an Alamo they can defend to the last man.
*All of which raises the question: What really does motivate opponents of marriage equality?
Well, there’s the obvious “Gay sex is yucky”, which wouldn’t be very compelling in court. Also, “My religion requires me to be a bigot”, which likewise has no legal heft. And there are people who just dislike change in general. But none of that really explains the opponents’ sky-is-falling urgency.
Tiffany Wayne suggests something deeper that I find more likely: Defense of “traditional marriage” is really about defending traditional gender roles. Same-sex marriage is threatening because it frames marriage as a negotiated relationship between equals, not as the divinely mandated submission of a wife/mother to the authority of a husband/father, each of whom has a well defined, divinely mandated role in the household.
I am struck in listening to the opposition to same-sex marriage by the persistent denial that gender is a socially constructed role. This is a “traditional” view of marriage in the sense that it is grounded in “biology is destiny,” or specific roles assigned based on sex. It is an extremely narrow view of “marriage” based on specific roles assigned by sex, rather than marriage as an emotional and physical and social partnership between two individuals. Most telling, it is a view that denies that heterosexual people can be in egalitarian marriages, or should be. It is a belief in “traditional” marriage as hierarchical. Not as a true partnership of equals, but as a microcosm of society with a power structure that flows from husband to wife to children.
SAVAGE: We only hear that monogamy or children or religion are defining characteristics of marriage when same-sex couples want to marry.
Straight couples write their own ticket. That’s why they can’t craft an argument to justify excluding same-sex couples from the institution of marriage. It’s not because we want to redefine it. It’s because straight people redefined it to an extent where there’s no argument that can be made to exclude same-sex couples.
It is the legal, romantic, hopefully sexual union of two legally autonomous individuals, period, the end. They get to write their own ticket, they get to write their own vows. They can, you know, assume all in their relationship and their marriage, all the typical things people might expect a marriage to be.
HAYES: Or not.
SAVAGE: Or they can write — they can be something very different. Marriage is very subjective and interesting and new. And redefined by straight people.
That is a more compelling reason to oppose marriage equality for same-sex couples: opposition to the equality-within-marriage that is becoming the new norm for straights and gays alike. It also explains why the religious right can’t make its case openly: That argument was already lost years ago.
and Mike Rice
I don’t usually do sports stories here, but the firing of the Rutgers basketball coach turned into something larger when conservative pundits framed Rice’s abusive behavior as “old-fashioned discipline”. What I find weird in the conservative focus on “discipline” is that they always think the people on the bottom need more discipline, never the people at the top. I elaborate in Mike Rice, Sean Hannity, and the Real American Discipline Problem. If you’re talking about bankers, billionaires, and CEOs, then I totally agree: America needs more discipline.
If this article reminds any of you of One Word Turns the Tea Party Around, where I made sense out of Tea Party rhetoric by changing the word government to corporations — yeah, me too.
and North Korea
All kinds of saber-rattling has been coming out of North Korea lately, and there’s a big debate on about whether this is business-as-usual, the new ruler trying to build respect inside his country, a predictable test for the new South Korean president, or something to worry about.
I have never pretended to understand North Korea, so I went looking for people who think they do. Foreign Policy has a worry-but-don’t-panic article. I also found this video dialog between Economist editors to be instructive.
and guns
This Dan Wasserman cartoon pretty well covers it: The Senate looks like it might not even pass the universal background check provision that 90% of the country supports. But substantial new gun laws have gotten through in Connecticut (Sandy Hook) and Colorado (Aurora, Columbine), as well as New York and Maryland.
One thing I think all the NRA-cowed politicians are forgetting: Yes, the wave set off by any particular massacre eventually dissipates, but what about the next one?
That’s why it’s important to bring anti-gun-violence measures to a vote, even if it’s obvious they won’t pass. If Sandy Hook turns out to be the last massacre, great. But if it’s not, and if the next one could have been prevented by the measures being debated now (as Sandy Hook could have been prevented by renewing the assault-weapon ban in 2004), we want a clear record of who was responsible for defeating those measures.
and you also might be interested in …
A serious polling group just polled a bunch of conspiracy theories the mainstream doesn’t usually take seriously. PPP finds that 37% of the public (and a majority of Republicans) think global warming is a hoax. 28% (and 36% of Romney voters) still think Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, which 11% of the public believes the government knew about in advance, but allowed to happen. And is Obama the Anti-Christ? 22% of Romney voters say yes.
Clearly, not enough people have read Cracked.com’s 5 Ways to Spot a Bullshit Political Story in Under 10 Seconds, which I linked to shortly after it came out last year. Way #2 is: “The headline is about a ‘lawmaker’ saying something stupid.” Cracked editor David Wong points out: There are 7,382 state legislators in the U.S.; any group that size is bound to have some whackjobs in it; and any one of them can introduce a bill.
So it would really be newsworthy if some week no crazy-assed bills were proposed.
Rule of thumb: Don’t waste your outrage. Unless your representative is the one embarrassing himself, pay no attention to a crazy-sounding bill in your own state legislature until it has gotten out of committee. Pay no attention to a crazy bill in some other state until it has passed one house.
Homework: The next crazy NC bill, to put a two-year waiting period on divorces. Is it time to get upset or not?
National Review and I have different visions of Wonderland.
Government shall not substantially burden a person’s freedom of religion. The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief may not be substantially burdened unless the government proves by clear and convincing evidence that it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest.
Religious conservatives have been moving in this direction for several years, with bills that allow medical service providers to refuse to provide services that violate their conscience (i.e., druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions for an abortion-inducing drug like RU-486), and with the court case challenging whether health insurance provided by private employers has to provide the contraception coverage mandated by ObamaCare. (As far as I know, no EMT has become a Jehovah’s Witness and refused to give blood transfusions, but I believe he would have that right in Mississippi.)
As much as I dislike this bill, part of me is glad it passed, because I can stop making slippery-slope arguments now that Kentucky has slid all the way to the bottom. Now, if you don’t want to hire women, you can invoke this law and your sincerely held religious belief that a woman’s place is in the home. If you don’t want to serve blacks, invoke this law and your sincere belief that God doesn’t want the races to mix.
Of course, I don’t recommend you try to invoke this law if your sincere beliefs are Muslim or atheist. As we’ve seen in neighboring Tennessee, religious freedom is for Christians — you knew that, right?
But anyway, run free, religious Christian Kentuckians!
One of the week’s more interesting stories was the firing of Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice after a video came out showing him physically and verbally abusing his players.
But that’s a sports story, and (in spite of being a major sports fan) I don’t usually cover sports on this blog. What makes the it something more, though, is the way that some conservative political pundits* made Rice a symbol of “old-fashioned discipline” — something they think our country needs. Sean Hannity said:
I’m watching this and I’m thinking, ‘All right, I don’t like this. … But on the other hand, I kind of like old-fashioned discipline.’ … Maybe we need a little more discipline in society.
And you know something? Sean is absolutely right. This is a story about discipline, and our country really does have a discipline problem. I could line up a bunch of conservative-pundit quotes about the failure of American discipline and agree with them completely, after I make one small adjustment: They’ve flipped everything upside down.
Is the problem at the bottom or the top? The Sean Hannities, Michele Malkins, and Eric Bollings would have you believe that our national discipline problem is the laziness and dysfunctionality of the people at the bottom of the pyramid (represented in this story by the Rutgers players, most of whom probably come from poor families and need the scholarship Rice could take away from them), and that the Mike-Rices-in-charge need a freer hand to whip them into shape.
Seven red states already require drug tests for welfare recipients, and threaten those who fail with the loss of benefits. Other red states are considering such laws, in spite of the fact that the predictions haven’t panned out. The NYT summarizes: “a Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.” In These Times notes: “the notion that low-income families are overwhelmingly riddled with substance abuse is one that researchers across the country have discredited time and time again.”
Republicans repeatedly opposed extending unemployment benefits in the wake of the Great Recession, arguing that people would not get out and find jobs without the threat of destitution. But research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concluded that this effect is small. Overwhelmingly, the unemployed failed to find jobs because there were no jobs.
Again and again during the 2012 presidential campaign, conservative candidates warned against the poor becoming “dependent on government”. Mitt Romney’s 47% video was the most famous example, but far from the only one. Newt Gingrich pledged, “If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” Again, the implication is that large numbers of Americans prefer government handouts and would rather not work — and that benefit cuts are necessary to discipline them.
I agree that America faces a major discipline problem, but I see the lack of discipline at the top: the bankers, the billionaires, the CEOs. Like Mike Rice, they’re out of control and need to face the consequences of their actions.
The Rice video was seen by Rutgers officials months ago, and their response was a wrist-slap: Rice was suspended for three games and told not to do it again. Isn’t that typical of how things go in America?
Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship treated safety violations in his coal mines as a cost of doing business. He stonewalled the EPA, dragged things out in court as long as possible, and then paid wrist-slap fines. In a very real sense, he murdered the 29 miners who died in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Is he in jail? On trial? Have we at least closed the barn door after the horse escaped? No, of course not. According to In These Times, Massey was sold to another corporation for $8.5 billion, Blankenship walked away with $12 million in severance and a $27 million deferred-compensation package, and “Congress has not passed any legislation tightening mine safety regulations.”
Dick Cheney has repeatedly and publicly claimed “credit” for the Bush administration’s program of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” (the preferred euphemism for torture, which Ronald Reagan signed a treaty against). Waterboarding is an internationally recognized war crime for which we court-martialed our own soldiers in 1898 and executed Japanese soldiers after World War II. Is Cheney awaiting trial at The Hague? Don’t be silly. He has not even been shunned, either for his confessed crimes or for the gross incompetence of authoring our disastrous Iraq invasion. Wyoming Republicans invited him to speak at their state convention last spring. His daughter may well carry on the family legacy in future elections.
I could go on; don’t even get me started on the Catholic clergy’s handling of their sex-abuse problem.
So yes, this is a story about discipline, but not about its failure: Mike Rice’s firing is a rare example of the success of discipline in America. For once, a misbehaving person in authority faced some consequences.
How did discipline succeed this time? Michele Malkin attributed Rice’s firing to “political correctness” and “the left-wing media makes a big fuss”.
In the real world, the relatively apolitical ESPN called public attention to the Rice video, and from there social media took over. Particularly damaging to Rice were the comments by professional athletes like LeBron James. And unlike, say, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America, Rutgers needs both applications from students and support from the legislature, so it has to care about its public image. (With the banks, the political pressure pushes the other way: bankers pressure politicians. Watching Congress interview banker Jamie Dimon, it was obvious who was the king and who were the courtiers.)
So in this unusual case, wrong-doing in high places got called to public attention, and the public had a way to make its power felt. Maybe that’s what we need more of if we’re going to fix our discipline problem. But Malkin disagrees:
I think there should be scrutiny of people who blow the whistle on these kinds of things.
Wussification. The weirdest response to the Rice firing came from another Fox host, Eric Bolling:
We’re in the midst of political correctness crushing our ability to teach kids, to discipline kids … I talk about the wussification of America, wussification of American men, this is it.
The idea seems to be that American kids — boys, at least — need authoritarian abuse to toughen them up. Sean Hannity seemed to agree:
Maybe we don’t have to be a bunch of wimps for the rest of our lives. My father hit me with a belt. I turned out okay.***
Again, I think they’ve got this upside-down. Who’s the wuss in the Mike Rice story? Mike Rice, that’s who. Atlantic writer Patrick Hruby explains:
Rice is lucky he’s not in jail, and luckier still that his players aren’t in jail for beating him half to death. Because if he acted the way he did in a bar, a classroom, or an office, there’s a good chance one or both of those scenarios would have taken place. But that’s the thing: Take Rice out of a practice gym, and it’s highly unlikely he would have behaved so badly. He did what he did because he’s a coach, and as a coach he had the power to do it. He knew his players wouldn’t fight back.
What’s wussier than that? We’re not “toughening” our boys by leaving them in the charge of men like Mike Rice. We’re teaching them that they should also try to gain institutional power, so that they too can push around guys they’d be afraid to face man-to-man.
Real men, real values. Hruby continues:
Forget sports culture. Forget macho culture. Like I said, this is a bullying story. And bullying is about abuse. Abuse and the misuse of power. Not to get all Spider-Man here, but in civilized society, great power means greater responsibility.
No Patrick, don’t apologize for getting all Spider-Man. That’s exactly the kind of “old-fashioned values” (Stan Lee — 1962) that American culture has lost and needs to recapture. Peter Parker becomes a hero precisely because he had an Uncle Ben in his life, not a Mike Rice.
The “real men” we need our boys to look up to are the ones who see their authority as a challenge to meet a higher standard of behavior, not an opportunity to live by a lower one.
* To his credit, Gov. Christie was having none of it.
** Full disclosure: My nephew works for the Democratic Caucus in the Tennessee Senate, which controls a mere 7 of the 33 seats.
*** Jon Stewart questioned this conclusion: “Seriously? You’re OK? Have you seen your show? Cause it seems like the show of a guy who was hit with a belt as a child.”
After two weeks off, the Weekly Sift is back. This week’s featured article will focus on the conservative pundits who framed the firing of player-abusing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice as a defeat for “old-fashioned discipline” at the hands of the “liberal media” and “political correctness”.
I too see this as a story about the decline of discipline in America, but I think Sean Hannity is looking at it upside-down: America’s real discipline problem is at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. Like Mike Rice, our bankers, billionaires, and CEOs are running wild, and their misbehavior mostly goes unpunished, even when it’s criminal. Rice has become one of the rare examples of the success of discipline in America — a person in authority made to face the consequences of his actions.
We’d fix a lot of what’s wrong in America if we could get back to the “old-fashioned discipline” Stan Lee put in the mouth of Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben in 1962: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And accountability. And a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.
In the weekly summary I’ll review what people have been talking about these last few weeks: what the Supreme Court will do with same-sex marriage, whether this wave of outrage at gun violence will result in any changes, and how seriously we should take the threats coming out of North Korea. Plus, short notes that include what an honest cable company would tell the public.
No Sift the next two weeks, but new posts will appear April 8.
[That’s why today’s Sift is a little extra-long.]
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.
This week everybody was talking about the new Pope …
and especially about the symbols of his humility, like riding the bus with the rest of the cardinals instead of using a fancy popemobile, eating simple food, dropping by the hotel he was leaving to pick up his own luggage, and so on. That fits with choosing the name Francis and how he has lived as Cardinal Bergoglio. It’s also what you might expect from the first Jesuit pope.
That symbolism that could communicate something important about how he wants to run the Catholic Church — maybe a way to tell the clergy that Catholicism isn’t all about them — or it could just be the trappings of a public image. Too soon to tell.
The good part of Francis’ record is that he cares about the poor, and more generally about economic justice and the inequality of wealth. Popes usually do — something conservative Catholics like Paul Ryan tend to ignore. In general, 20th and 21st century popes have been far more socialist than, say, Barack Obama. But National Review tells the right-wing faithful not to worry:
His counting poverty as a social ill should not be misconstrued as sympathy for statist solutions to it or, indeed, as support for any determinate political program.
On the other hand, his social beliefs are pretty discouraging. Francis isn’t likely to soften the Church’s opposition to reproductive rights, gay rights, or female priests. However, he apparently did not say: “Women are naturally unfit for public office.” A lengthier version of that quote has been floating around the internet all week, but Snopes can’t find any prior record of it. (Always check Snopes.com before you forward something outrageous.)
Some prominent human rights activists have come to Bergoglio’s defense. Argentine Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who was jailed and tortured by the dictatorship, told the BBC’s Spanish-language service that Bergoglio “was not an accomplice of the dictatorship. … There were bishops who were accomplices of the Argentine dictatorship, but not Bergoglio.”
On the other hand, he also didn’t stand up against the regime, which undermines his moral authority.
At the time, my position on marriage for same-sex couples was rooted in my faith tradition that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years.
Dick Cheney had a similar awakening for similar reasons in 2004, so this may be the way Republicans fulfill my prediction that everybody will support same-sex marriage by 2030. And while I’m glad to see the switch, the self-centered reasoning still bugs me. When will a Republican change his mind — on anything — out of compassion for other people’s families?
Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we’re all set.
which inspired Kevin Drum to note that Republicans with daughters do vote slightly better on women’s issues. And which Republican senators voted for the Violence Against Women Act? A handful of men and all five women.
The case against the pipeline involves one key point that people don’t want to hear: If we’re not going to totally wreck the climate, we have to leave some fossil fuels in the ground. The Canadian oil sands would seem to be the perfect candidate. And if not, then what is our plan? I flesh that argument out in “A Hotter Planet is in the Pipeline“.
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As the 10-year-anniversary approaches, more and more people are looking back at the Iraq War. David Frum shares this revelation: The reason the war looked so poorly thought out was that nobody ever thought it out.
For a long time, war with Iraq was discussed inside the Bush administration as something that would be decided at some point in the future; then, somewhere along the way, war with Iraq was discussed as something that had already been decided long ago in the past.
Paul Krugman points out this absurdity: In 2003, millions around the world were protesting the looming invasion, and yet
To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.
The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration.
He notes the same circularity in today’s budget debate. If you don’t think cutting the deficit is a major priority, you’re out of the mainstream. Your opinion is unworthy of consideration, even if you’ve got a Nobel Prize in economics.
Rick Perlstein describes the outrageous state of those click-through contracts you don’t read when you buy software.
Recently I sat down to talk to an activist who’s doing something about it. When Theresa Amato of Faircontracts.org, who sat with me recently for an interview, told me about this business of companies reserving—and exercising—the right to change contracts after their customers have signed them, and courts upholding that right, I paused a bit. I said I was speechless. “Yes,” she replied. “You should be speechless. And so should everyone.” She laughs—in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying kind of way: “To call this fine print ‘contracts’ is almost a misnomer.” She corrects herself: “It is a misnomer, according to contract theory, because there’s no mutual consent there.”
Matt Yglesias points out that the time to avoid the next bank bailout is now, when the banks are taking profits out of the system. In bad times, when they don’t have money to cover their debts, it will be too late.
Meanwhile, I haven’t figured out what the Cyprus thing is all about yet.
Noam Chomsky didn’t invent this idea, but this is about the clearest expression of it I’ve heard:
If you want to privatize something and destroy it, a standard method is first to defund it, so it doesn’t work anymore, people get upset and accept privatization. This is happening in the schools. They are defunded, so they don’t work well. So people accept a form of privatization just to get out of the mess.
Speaking of schools, Atlantic calls attention to something that always seems to get left out of American articles on Finland’s world-leading school system: The Finns don’t allow privately funded schools. So the rich can’t opt out of the public system and spend more on their own kids.
Across the board, Finland does exactly the opposite of what our school reformers want: no standardized tests, lots of teacher independence, little competition between schools. It seems to work.
This week’s indictment of American democracy: According to a ABC/Washington Post poll, 91% of Americans support universal background checks for gun buyers. But when the bill came up in the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, every Republican voted against it. It passed 10-8 on a party-line vote, but in the full Senate it won’t get past a filibuster without at least a few Republican votes.
So how does a major party unanimously defy 91% of the public? Well, look at a different news story: Scott Brown was known as “Wall Street’s favorite senator“, even though Wall Street is not particularly popular with his constituents in deep-blue Massachusetts. But now that the voters have thrown him out, Brown is doing better than ever. Monday he joined law firm Nixon Peabody, which lobbies for (among others) Goldman Sachs. He also has a gig at Fox News and makes good money speaking at conservative and corporate events. None of that would have happened if he had honestly represented his constituents.
In short, Scott Brown’s real career is as a conservative, not as a servant of the people. He furthered that career by defying the voters to maintain his conservative bona fides. That’s what the 8 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are doing.
While we’re talking about guns and Republicans: In only a few short months Ted Cruz has become my least favorite senator. Everybody has some personality trait they just can’t stomach; mine is arrogant stupidity. Like Joe Scarborough said: “When you’re condescending and you don’t even have the facts right … I’ve got a problem with that.”
Cruz’s interaction with Senator Feinstein Thursday was classic arrogant stupidity. First, he addresses Feinstein as if she might never have heard of the Second Amendment before. Then he makes two asinine analogies — comparing Feinstein’s assault-weapon ban to Congress specifying that “the First Amendment shall only apply to the following books” or “the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures could properly apply only to the following individuals”.
The First Amendment already doesn’t apply to child pornography. The Fourth Amendment is already riddled with exceptions (like email stored in the cloud). And if the Second Amendment won’t let Congress put any limit on weapons (see the Scalia quote above) then how are we going to protect airliners from shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles?
After Feinstein slaps him down, Cruz responds with the classic “I admire your passion”, as if the considered response of a 20-year Senate veteran was just the sputtering of an emotional female.
Maybe Cruz’s response reminded Rachel Maddow of Alex Castellanos saying “I love how passionate you are” to her on Meet the Press last April. Whatever the reason, Rachel was in rare form Friday: She devoted a 17-minute segment to new details on the Newtown shooting, their relevance to Feinstein’s assault-weapon ban, and Feinstein’s history of being present at a colleague’s assassination, culminating in Rachel dishing a full heaping of scorn on Cruz’s ignorance and sexism.
It’s probably not fair to judge CPAC by one or two white supremacists, outrageous as they were. But this video looks like it might be a fair representation of how young conservatives think about climate change.
Chris Hayes is leaving my favorite weekend show (Up) and taking over the prestigious 8 p.m. weekday slot starting April 1. Here’s one of the many great things about Chris: He doesn’t use the standard old-white-guys Rolodex.
Our leaders expressed sorrow, promised justice, and asked for our cooperation. They got it. People sent in their photos, and studied photos taken by others. Asked to stay off the streets or keep to their homes, we did.
Along the way, we may exorcize another demon who has haunted us too long: the Terrorist Superman, who desires nothing but mayhem and can be stopped by nothing but death. Who requires superhuman security measures and inhuman methods of interrogation. The monster who can only be fought by other monsters.
*All of which raises the question: What really does motivate opponents of marriage equality?
The Weekly Sift 