Evolution/Creation for Non-Eggheads

Every year I use Darwin’s birthday (last Tuesday) as an excuse to check in on the creation/evolution issue and the debate over what to teach in public schools. That pot is always simmering, so whenever you choose to pay attention something is bound to be happening somewhere. But it gets dull really quickly, because both sides repeat themselves a lot. Checking once a year is about right.

This year I watched PBS documentary “The Revisionaries” about the battle over curriculum standards in Texas. (You can watch it for free on the PBS web site until Feb. 28.) As always, I was impressed by how well the creationist side pitches its arguments to the general public. “Teach both sides,” they say. “Teach the controversy. Teach the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.” It sounds so fair and reasonable — nothing at all like the stereotype of the crazy fundamentalist radical.

Then the scientists come on, and they look and sound exactly like their stereotype. You can tell they’re trying to be nice and non-threatening, but whatever they’re saying, the main thing that comes through is that they’re smart and they know better than you. It’s hard not to be reminded of all the other “experts” who are constantly explaining why everything you do is completely wrong: You eat wrong, you exercise wrong, you like the wrong kind of music, you watch the wrong kinds of movies and TV shows — everything you do is bad, and you should listen to them to learn how to do it right.

Most of all, you raise your kids wrong. When you let the kids do what they want, that’s wrong, but when you force them to do what you want, that’s wrong too. You talk to them wrong, you discipline them wrong — it goes on and on. And sure, you realize you aren’t the greatest human being who ever lived, but you do OK and your kids seem to be doing OK, so you wonder what you’d see if you walked into the experts’ houses and looked at their kids (if they have any). Are they better, really?

Sure, the evolution scientists are a different kind of expert entirely, but they look and sound exactly the same. You know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but the look-and-feel thing is hard to get past. Watching them, all you can think is: “What do they want really? And why? Can’t they just come out and say that?” But they don’t. So when preachers tell you that the scientists want to destroy religion and convert everybody to atheism — well, at least that’s an answer.

I’ve lived a bunch of my life between the world of scientists and the world of ordinary people. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest and spent a lot of afternoons helping my Dad on the farm. I went to a Lutheran grade school where we memorized Bible passages every night and had to recite them in the morning. (We definitely did not learn evolution. I started picking that up in the public high school.) But I was born with a knack for math and went on to get a bunch of degrees. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I can hang with them when they let their hair down and not seem out of place.

Let me see if I can translate how this discussion looks to a university biologist or a high school biology teacher.

Politicians are telling them how to do their job. I’m guessing you can appreciate how that feels. They’ve devoted their lives to studying biology, figuring out how it all fits together, and coming up with ways to teach that knowledge to other people. And then a legislature or a school board or Congress wants to stick a hand up their backsides and turn them into puppets who repeat whatever they’re supposed to say.

You know how you feel when people who don’t know your kids tell you how to raise your kids? Well, people who don’t know their subject are telling them how to teach their subject. It pisses them off.

One of the reasons they so often look phony is that emotional outbursts aren’t valued in scientific discussions. In science, you’re supposed to be reasonable all the time, even when you’re really pissed off. So they can’t let on how they really feel. Instead, all that anger gets channeled into a biting cleverness that can be really, really annoying.

Why evolution is important to them. I’m sure they think they answer this question all the time, but it never comes out in the language ordinary people speak, so let me see if I can explain it better.

Have you ever listened to six-year-old boys describe a movie they’ve just seen? They remember all of it — probably more than you would if you saw it. Their young brains are sponges that soak up detail. But when they talk about it, those details come back out in some stream of consciousness that you can’t possibly understand if you haven’t seen the movie yourself. That’s because they haven’t learned yet what a plot is, or how use a plot to organize a whole bunch of facts into a story that people can understand and think about together.

Well, evolution is the plot of biology. By now, we know so much about cells and animals and environments and so forth that no one could possibly deal with it as a long list of details. You couldn’t learn it, you couldn’t teach it, you couldn’t even think about it, no matter how smart you are. But evolution arranges all that in a structure that people can learn and teach and think about. Even if evolution had turned out not to be true, biologists would still want to learn it as a memory device. It’s that useful.

Now, the obvious question is: Couldn’t creation or design become the plot of biology? It more-or-less was 200 years ago. And sure, we have a lot more details to organize now than we did then, but maybe biologists could make all that new knowledge fit somehow. So rather than saying “Giraffes evolved long necks because being able to eat leaves higher in the canopy gave them a survival advantage”, we could say “God designed giraffes with long necks because he knew they’d need to eat leaves high in the canopy.”

What’s wrong with that?

The first answer you’re likely to get from a biologist is that it wouldn’t work, because of things like your appendix. (It’s hard to make sense of the human appendix from a design point of view, because it doesn’t do anything useful. It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, though, because similar organs serve a purpose in the digestive systems of animals we’re related to, and evolution works slowly, so it hasn’t been useless long enough to evolve away.)

But the better answer is: Who knows? Maybe there is some way to tie all our biological knowledge together in a design-oriented plot. But nobody has done it. Whether some design-oriented plot for biology could work or not, it doesn’t exist now. It’s like talking about whether solar power could someday supply all our needs. Maybe. But that doesn’t help me if I want to flip on a light now.

So if, today, you want to learn or teach or think about the full range of what we know about biology, evolution is all you’ve got. You either use it or you give up.

Creationist textbooks are facades. Biology teachers know that K-12 students in China, India, Europe, and Japan are learning real science, not fantasies about approaches to science that maybe could work someday (but don’t work now and probably won’t work ever). So they wonder: How are American kids going to compete if we’re wasting their time like that?

Creationists can hide this state of affairs from the general public by writing design-oriented grade school and high school textbooks. But those textbooks are like the facade of Dodge City on the set of Gunsmoke. You’re supposed to think a whole town is back there, but it isn’t. What you can see is pretty much all there is.

Similarly, that creationist high-school textbook looks like the beginning of a complete design-oriented biological education. But in fact students who finish it are pretty close to the end of the line. If they get interested in biology and want to go further, they’ll have to start over in college and learn evolution. That’s not because colleges censor design, it’s because there isn’t much more design-oriented biology to learn.

I know that’s hard to believe, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Go listen to a creationist lecture. I predict they won’t tell you much of anything about creationist biology. Instead, they’ll spend all their time criticizing evolution. That’s because they don’t have anything else to present. Creationists are also using evolution to organize their thinking; they’re just against it rather than for it.

And that’s not going to change anytime soon, because creationists are not even trying to develop their theory. The budgets of creationist think-tanks like the Discovery Institute are almost entirely devoted to politics and public relations, with barely anything for research.

Creationists cheat. If putting up that kind of facade seems like cheating, well, creationists cheat in a lot of other ways too. Many of those reasonable-sounding arguments are just word games designed to confuse people.

Like: “Evolution is a theory, not a fact.” Sounds convincing, doesn’t it? Even scientists talk about “the theory of evolution”, right?

Of course, scientists also talk about “the theory of gravity” and “the theory of the solar system”. The word theory has a specialized meaning in science that has nothing to do with uncertainty. Gravity isn’t doubtful just because we have a theory about it.

That kind of trickery is not exceptional, it’s typical. Creationist arguments are full of untruths, half-truths, and word games — and the arguments keep circulating no matter how many times the fallacies get exposed.

Which is another reason why scientists get tied up in emotional knots at these public hearings. Very often the folks presenting some totally bogus argument are mothers who have an honest religious faith and are very genuinely concerned about their kids’ education. But it’s hard to see how the people who invent and popularize these arguments — the folks at the Discovery Institute, say — can be anything other than con-men who know better.

Scientists don’t know how to deal with that. The whole culture of science (going back to the 1600s) is based on arguing in good faith and assuming that your opponent is doing the same. A scientist who gets caught cheating is finished. There’s no rehabilitation process, you’re just done being a scientist. But dishonest creationist arguments live forever, and the people who invent them are not even embarrassed.

We’ve been through this already. Now let’s talk about what’s wrong with “teaching the controversy”. When biologists refuse to “teach both sides” or “teach the controversy”, it sounds like they’ve made evolution into some kind of unquestionable dogma, like the Trinity or the divine inspiration of the Bible is in some religions.

Everybody knows that scientific theories are wrong sometimes, and history is full of controversies when one theory challenges another. (The most famous one is the Copernican Revolution, when a Sun-centered theory of the planets replaced and Earth-centered theory.) When scientists won’t “teach the controversy” of evolution, they seem to be denying this history and to be hypocrites about the whole process of science.

What most people don’t realize is that there was a creation/evolution controversy in science, but it has been over for a long time. Scientists argued vociferously about evolution in the 1800s. By the 20th century the fact of evolution was widely accepted, but scientists continued to argue over the mechanism (i.e. natural selection) until mid-century, when the modern evolutionary synthesis came together. Just about all the scientific questions raised by creationists today were asked and answered generations ago.

Here’s an example: “Evolution can’t explain a complex organ like the eye.” Evolutionists run into that claim all the time, but in fact the basic framework of how the eye evolved was laid out more than half a century ago. If you’ve got two-and-a-half minutes, here’s the simple version.

If you’ve got an hour, here’s more detail.

The creation/evolution argument continues today not because new evidence raises new questions about evolution, but because people don’t want to believe answers that conflict with their religion. That is a religious controversy, not a scientific one. And if enough people want to impose their religion on the rest of us, they can create a political controversy or a legal controversy. But you can’t create a scientific controversy just by refusing believe something you don’t want to believe.

So by all means let’s teach the creation/evolution controversy in a history of science course, or in a course on religion, politics, or law. But it doesn’t belong in a biology class.

What’s different about evolution? And now we come to the most recent creationist political strategy (the one portrayed in The Revisionists): demanding that textbooks and curricula teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary theory.

Again, that is well constructed to make scientists look bad. What kind of dogmatist would refuse to let students learn about the weaknesses of his ideas? What’s he afraid of?

But a better question to ask at this point is: Why are we just talking about evolution? Why do the textbook stickers warn students to have “an open mind” just about evolution? Shouldn’t they also “critically consider” the “strengths and weaknesses“of theories like the solar system? the atom? continental drift?

What’s special about evolution?

Only this: Evolution conflicts with a popular religion. Otherwise, it’s like the germ theory of disease, electrical circuit theory, or any other scientific theory. (The solar system used to conflict with popular religion, but it no longer does.)

So again, this is dressed up like a conversation about science, but it’s really about religion. There’s no scientific reason to pick evolution out for special scrutiny.

What’s wrong with that? Some creationists are very open and honest about wanting to impose their views on the public through the public schools. In a democracy, the religion of the majority tends to become the religion of the government, and public resources are used to promote it.

I think the Founders looked at what had been happening in England since the Reformation — religious factions squabbling to get control of the government — and they wrote the First Amendment specifically to prevent that from happening here.

But that issue takes us into textbook history standards, and a whole other set of things people want or don’t want to believe. Maybe I’ll save that topic for James Madison‘s birthday in March.

February 18, 2013 – 9:38 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week’s featured article is an attempt to take on the creation/evolution debate in a non-eggheady way. (Happy birthday, Chuck Darwin. I hope I’ll still be relevant when I’m 204, but I kind of doubt it.) The weekly summary will focus on the new stuff in the State of the Union, the complete unresponsiveness of the Rubio/Paul SOTU responses,  and a new book about the food mega-corporations. Plus: Is it great to have Elizabeth Warren in the Senate or what?

I’m battling a cold today, so when this will all appear depends on my nap schedule.

February 18, 2013 – 7:39 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Violations

What we need to do is optimize transparency on these issues, but at the same time, optimize secrecy.

— CIA Director nominee John Brennan, testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee

Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

— George Orwell, 1984

I believe that every American has the right to know when the government believes it has the right to kill them. 

— Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), letter to John Brennan

Catch-22 states that agents enforcing Catch-22 need not prove that Catch-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating.

— Joseph Heller, Catch-22

This week everybody was talking about targeted killings

In particular: When can a president send a drone or a strike team to kill an American citizen he thinks (or says) is a terrorist? How can we square the war-fighting power the Constitution grants a president with a citizen’s constitutional right to due process of law? When does traitorous-death-in-battle shade over into execution-without-trial?

And the answer is: It’s a secret. Maybe if you discovered the conditions under which the government could kill you, the government would have to kill you.

OK, that was flip. Here’s what’s actually true: The memo that explains the Obama administration’s reasoning process on killing Americans has not been released to the public. It hasn’t even been released to Congress, though by Friday the Senate Intelligence Committee had received a copy, and the parallel House committee has been promised one. The rest of Congress will remain in the dark.

Like most liberal bloggers, I was all over this kind of thing when President Bush was doing it. A few (notably Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler) stayed on it when Obama continued (or sometimes even expanded) Bush’s policies. I came back to the topic now and then (Execution Without Trial when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in 2011, and again last June in Who Can Obama Kill?), but never gave it the week-in-week-out attention that I had in the Bush years.

This week, the hearings to confirm John Brennan as CIA Director brought it all back to center stage. Reading and watching the coverage, I think it’s important to keep the right issues in mind. Don’t get distracted by the technology of drones, because this isn’t a technological issue. And while you should definitely pay attention to the who-can-Obama-kill issue, there’s something even more important to keep your eye on, because it concerns one of the deepest and oldest principles of democracy and the rule of law: The law should never be secret.

I lay this out in more detail in Secret Laws II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it.

and the weather …

We had some snow in the northeast. Maybe you heard about it.

and guns and immigration …

About that path to citizenship: House Republicans would rather have a permanent underclass.

The NRA says we don’t need new gun laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have. But it also lobbies to undermine the enforcement of gun laws at every turn, both by underfunding the ATF and by tying ATF agents up in red tape. USA Today has the details.

Republicans still live in their own universe. PPP asked 508 Republican primary voters “What do you think is a bigger safety threat in America: guns or violent video games?” [It comes late in the survey. If you follow the link, scroll way down.]

Guns 14%
Video games 67%
Not sure 19%

Steve Benen, God bless him, responds as if evidence and logic matter.

Gaming is a huge cultural phenomenon in countries like South Korea, England, Japan, and Canada — and they’re all playing many of the same games Americans enjoy — and yet, none of these countries comes close to the U.S. when it comes to deadly shootings. … [S]ocieties with fewer guns have less gun violence, whether they’re playing “Halo” or not.

(Benen also responded with evidence and logic when a Fox News “expert” claimed that solar energy works in Germany because it’s so sunny there.)

Being more cynical, I question whether any Republicans believe video games are more threatening than guns, or if ideology just obligates them to say so. If there are two open seats on the subway — one next to a stranger with a gun, the other next to a stranger with a video game — do two-out-of-three of Republicans really feel safer taking the seat next to the gunman?

Anti-NRA political advertising seems to be working in Illinois.

and you also might be interested in …

If the Pope expected his resignation to make his critics let up, I’m sure he’s disappointed.

It’s not just the filibuster or voter suppression or rigging the electoral college, Republicans have a comprehensive strategy for minority rule.

That hype about energy independence: to the extent it happens at all, it’s only temporary.

Sam Killermann is compiling examples of privilege: middle-to-upper-class privilege, male privilege, and Christian privilege.

My father was a white farmer (well, ethnically European farmer — the exposed parts of his face and arms got pretty brown by August) who drove a tractor and a pick-up truck, so I was touched by the Dodge Ram Super Bowl commercial based on the Paul Harvey prose-poem “So God Made a Farmer”.

But that points to one more example of privilege: A Super Bowl commercial full of people like me seems normal. Here’s the same Paul Harvey narration with a slideshow of (the far more numerous) Latino farmers.

I like that response. It expresses no hostility towards white farmers or Paul Harvey or even Dodge. It just rights the balance.

And TV critic David Hinckley provided what Paul Harvey used to call “the rest of the story”.

[F]or almost a century America has been driving the person Harvey and this ad are celebrating, the family farmer, out of business. … [The ad] felt a little like erecting a beautiful statue to a species we are hunting into extinction.

And of course there were parodies like, “So God Made a Banker“.

This week in hypocrisy. Ron Paul is using the machinery of world government against his fans.

For years now, RonPaul.com has been a Ron Paul fan site, promoting Paul’s ideas, books, candidacy etc., but not owned or run by Paul himself. It’s been an active site, with numerous postings getting thousands of comments.

Now Paul has decided he wants to own the URL. The current owners have offered him RonPaul.org (which they also own) for free, but they want $250,000 for RonPaul.com — and they’ll throw in their 170,000-name mailing list, which they claim is worth the quarter million on its own.

Instead, Paul has filed a case with the World Intellectual Property Organization under rules designed to root out cyber-squatters — the kind of people who register JethroTull.com for no other purpose than to sell it to the band for an exorbitant price.

“Ron Paul,” his filing claims, “enjoys a national reputation in the United States as premier advocate for liberty in American politics today.” Or at least he used to.

Dick Cheney, the mastermind behind the Iraq War, criticized President Obama for appointing “second-rate people” like John Kerry and Chuck Hagel to key national security posts.

My current supply of snark is insufficient to generate a proper response.

Bill Maher schools Donald Trump on why you should never start an absurd argument with a comedian. It’s their turf.

Every now and then you see an idea that has to be somebody’s ultimate fantasy. Here’s one: a TED talk by a supermodel. It’s actually pretty good.

And every now and then, people convince you that they’re even worse than you thought. Here’s one: a writer at redstate.com cuts through all that nonsense about concussions and dementia and gets to the heart of why liberals seem to be down on football: President Obama wants us to be a nation of pansies, because real men with balls threaten his power.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern keeps it real: The pro-gun “Sandy Hook father” isn’t really a Sandy Hook father. And the actual anti-gun Sandy Hook father didn’t really get “heckled”.

If nobody is dancing at your Occupy/Tea Party Unity party, cue this up.

February 11, 2013 – 12:29 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Secret Laws II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it

Perversely, I wish that the War on Terror would give us a poster child, some cute and innocent victim of government over-reach whose picture we could put on placards and wave as we march through the streets. But for nearly 12 years, under both Bush and Obama, the government has been either too smart or too lucky to provide us with one.

Bad posters. Jose Padilla was an American citizen arrested at O’Hare Airport. Before he was charged with any crime, he spent more than three years in solitary confinement, including sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation. Quite likely he had been driven insane by the time he faced trial. But he was a brown-skinned Chicago street thug who, even if he never actually did any acts of terror (and may never have done anything), was a big talker. And they did eventually manage to convict him on a vague conspiracy charge (after he was mentally unable to either defend himself or trust any lawyer), so he doesn’t generate a lot of public sympathy.

Maher Arar was a Canadian/Syrian dual citizen who didn’t officially enter the U.S. at all. We arrested him during a layover at JFK Airport, held him for two weeks, and then shipped him off to be tortured in Syria for nearly a year. Both Syria and Canada say he was innocent, and he was eventually released. Canada awarded him millions in damages, but the U.S. government so far has avoided avoided any legal repercussions by claiming that it can’t defend against Arar’s lawsuit without revealing state secrets. (The torture happened during the Bush years, but the Obama administration is continuing the state-secrets claim.) But Arar isn’t a good poster child either, because he looks foreign, isn’t an American citizen, and wants to forget his whole ordeal.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who was targeted and killed by an American drone attack in 2011 in Yemen, a country where we are not officially at war. What label to put on his death — casualty, assassination, execution — is debatable. But it is not debatable that he was charged with nothing and never had a trial. He’s also a bad poster child, though, because he supported Al Qaeda and counseled people like the Fort Hood shooter. The government claims he planned terrorist attacks, but no evidence supporting that claim has ever been made public.

These cases show that something is deeply screwed up. But without a sympathetic face to put on a procedural abuse, it’s hard to get anybody excited. If the government could torture Jose Padilla or kill Anwar al-Awlaki without any legal process, it could do same to you or me. Since we refuse to identify with people like Padilla and Awlaki, though, we don’t feel personally threatened.

Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for …” is one of the most widely abused quotes in current American political discourse, but this is the setting where it makes sense: When you let the government violate the rights of people you don’t like or don’t care about, you lose the principle. Someday you may be unpopular too, and then how will you defend yourself?

Secret laws under Bush. One of the worst abuses of the Bush administration didn’t even produce bad poster children, because it was abstract: They used secret legal opinions to justify their other power grabs.

When it took office, the Obama administration seemed to be rejecting that course by releasing nine secret memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. The memos explained why it was legal for the President to violate treaties, wiretap without warrants, and do just about anything he thought national security required. Jack Balkin summed it up like this:

The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief.

To understand the power of these memos, you need understand the role of the OLC: It’s essentially the executive branch’s version of the Supreme Court. If you work for any department or agency of the federal government and you wonder whether something you’re doing is legal, you ask your office’s lawyers. If they kick the question upstairs, and then the upstairs lawyers kick it further upstairs, eventually it winds up at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. Somebody at the OLC writes a memo, and that memo is then the official interpretation of the law for the whole federal government — at least until somebody sues and the judicial branch starts weighing in.

So if you as a government official believe that the policy you’re implementing is unconstitutional, that’s not for you to say. If the OLC has blessed it, they’re the experts.

That’s a fine system as long as the OLC does its job in good faith and is accountable for its mistakes. But the Bush OLC wrote opinions to justify whatever the administration wanted to do, regardless of the law or the Constitution; and it avoided accountability by keeping its most egregious memos secret, so that non-administration legal experts could not tell the public (or Congress) how absurd they were. I commented at the time:

You never need to classify the fact that 2+2=4. But if you want the government to operate under the assumption that 2+2=5, then you do have to classify it

There is a role for secrecy at the OLC, but only in so far as the facts of the situation are classified. So, for example, if the Pentagon wanted to know whether a proposed weapons system would violate a treaty, a memo answering that specific question might necessarily include classified facts about the system. But a purely abstract memo explaining how the OLC interprets the language of the treaty — there’s no excuse for classifying stuff like that.

In fact, this kind of secrecy violates the oldest, most basic principle of the rule of law: The law must be public. If, behind the scenes, you can interpret the law away or even reverse it completely, then we don’t have the rule of law.

Targeted killing. The hard questions of law happen when two constitutional principles conflict. For example: I have freedom of the press, but my right to publish can be limited by Congress’ power to establish copyrights. I have freedom of speech, but some speech is libel or treason or fraud or pornography. Questions about where the boundaries fall are why we need people on the Supreme Court rather than machines.

The Constitution gives lots of rights to American citizens accused of crimes. The Sixth Amendment says:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

And the Fourteenth says that this is not a narrow right:

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

This clause has been interpreted as applying to the federal government as well as the states.

On the other hand, the Constitution also gives the government the power to make war. It doesn’t define war, but it’s hard to imagine any definition that wouldn’t include the power to kill people without trials. When an American citizen enters a battlefield wearing enemy colors — as many did during the Civil War — the government’s power to make war trumps the citizen’s right to a trial or any other kind of due process. That’s never been controversial.

But the War on Terror has fuzzed everything up. The enemy isn’t a country or government. Its soldiers don’t wear uniforms. The conflict often does not take the form of “battles” fought on “battlefields”. No one knows when the war might be over or what conditions could end it.

So the boundary between war-making powers and Sixth-Amendment rights is not so clear any more. If the government thinks you might be a terrorist in league with Al Qaeda, when can it kill you as if you were an enemy soldier on a battlefield, and when does it have to prove its case to a jury?

This ties in with a bunch of your other constitutional rights. Are you free to hang around with people the government thinks are terrorists or to communicate with them frequently? Can you work with them on projects that you believe are unrelated to terrorism? Can you put forward ideas that are not themselves treason, but are congenial to people who might be enemies?

And finally: What’s your protection against being killed by a rogue government official who just doesn’t like you? Can he invent a charge of terrorism against you, or exaggerate your real-but-harmless connections to terrorists?

As unsympathetic as he was in many ways, Anwar al-Awlaki exemplified all those issues. He wasn’t on a traditional battlefield when we blew up his car, and while he undoubtedly had some relationship to Al Qaeda, the government never had to back up its claims that he had an operational role in terrorism. Here’s what I wrote at the time of his death:

Al-Awlaki is dead because the President signed a piece of paper saying that he was a bad man. I suspect he probably was a bad man, so it’s hard to be all that broken up about his death. But in theory, the President (or some future president) could sign a piece of paper saying that I’m a bad man too. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some due process about that?

Secret laws under Obama. You know what the answer to that question is? It’s a secret. There’s an OLC memo describing when the president can order a hit on an American citizen, but it hasn’t been released to the public, or even to Congress. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees just got it, after asking for years. 

So that’s the state of transparency on this issue: The boundary between the government’s war-making power and the citizen’s right to trial is secret.

In a letter to CIA-Director nominee John Brennan, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says:

I believe that every American has the right to know when the government believes it has the right to kill them. 

The Obama administration disagrees. Wyden has raised another question I hadn’t even considered: Does the government owe a citizen the right to surrender?

Think about it. The process that puts names onto the kill list is secret, so you might not know you’re on it until you se the drones circling. What if you want to turn yourself in? What if you think this is all a big mistake and you want to clear your name? If you’re not actually pointing a weapon at someone at the moment, aren’t you due that much process?

These are not questions about weapons systems or the identities of secret agents. They are abstract questions of law, that could and should be debated in public. If the administration has any reason for dodging that discussion — beyond simple embarrassment at the flimsiness of its justifications — it isn’t telling anybody.

February 11, 2013 – 10:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The John Brennan confirmation hearings have shamed me into recognizing that a lot of the stuff I hated in the Bush administration has continued under Obama. Not that I didn’t know that, and I even wrote about it from time to time, but I had lost my sense of urgency about it.

It’s the same problem Republicans had during the Bush years: Yes, these powers invite abuse, but I trust Obama not to do the worst possible things with them. So I’m against the powers, but I’ve had a hard time maintaining my outrage. During the campaign, no Democrat challenged Obama, and no Republican  — other than Ron Paul, who I don’t trust and can’t accept for a lot of other reasons — recognized these issues at all. So what was the point of bringing it all up?

That’s the wrong way to think about it. This is supposed a government of laws, not of men. Whatever powers we allow Obama to wield will still be there for the next president, and the one after that. Eventually something really bad is going to happen. So the featured article this week will be “Secret Law II: It’s just as bad when Obama does it”. It still needs work, so it may not appear until almost noon.

The weekly summary will be worth looking at just for the opening quotes. There’s also a great snow photo from Nemo, a few more links on guns, an infectious British bar song that both Occupiers and Tea Partiers should be able to dance to, one more reason not to trust Ron Paul, Bill Maher’s hilarious reprisal in an argument Donald Trump really should have left alone, great responses to that Super Bowl ad about farmers, and more.

February 11, 2013 – 6:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Being Them

It’s easy sometimes for the [immigration] discussion to take on a feeling of us versus them. And when that happens, a lot of folks forget that most of us used to be them.

— President Barack Obama (Tuesday)

This week everybody was talking about immigration

The early part of a new presidential term is a magic moment for discussing the country’s real problems and what might be done about them. At the beginning of Obama’s first term we talked about how to stimulate the economy and expand access to healthcare. This time we’re talking about guns, immigration, and (maybe soon) climate change.

There’s no guarantee anything will get done, but isn’t it wonderful to be talking about something real? “Why can’t we do this all the time?” you wonder, and I have no answers.

So this week a bipartisan group of senators presented their immigration framework and President Obama responded by presenting his. (A bipartisan group in the House is still working on its plan.) Each has four parts, and the parts are remarkably similar: border security, a path to citizenship for people currently in the country illegally, and stopping undocumented workers from getting jobs are mentioned in both. Obama talks about “streamlining our legal immigration system” while the senators’ proposal seems a little more specifically business-focused: “admitting future workers to serve our nation’s workforce needs” — but those goals seem compatible.

At this point, both proposals are just lists of principles; there is no actual immigration bill yet. So a lot can still go wrong. Maybe the details will be hard to hash out, or maybe the two sides aren’t as serious as they look. We’ll see.

Republicans and the Hispanic vote. The one lesson Republicans seem to have learned from November is that they need more Hispanic votes. But opinions on how to get them vary.

Some think it will be enough to showcase more Hispanic names and faces. Put Marco Rubio or maybe Ted Cruz on the 2016 ticket, they think, and the Hispanic problem goes away. (The same people thought Sarah Palin would bring Hillary Clinton’s female supporters to John McCain. It didn’t work out.)

Another school believes Republicans just have to change their rhetoric. Stop talking about “sending them all back” or “anchor babies”, stop taking public stands against immigration reform, and presto!

Another faction thinks it’s pointless even to try. National Review promotes the same you-aren’t-good-enough-to-vote-for-us message that worked so well for Mitt Romney:

While many [Hispanics] are in business for themselves, they express hostile attitudes toward free enterprise in polls. They are disproportionately low-income and disproportionately likely to receive some form of government support. More than half of Hispanic births are out of wedlock. Take away the Spanish surname and Latino voters look a great deal like many other Democratic constituencies. Low-income households headed by single mothers and dependent upon some form of welfare are not looking for an excuse to join forces with Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey. Given the growing size of the Hispanic vote, it would help Republicans significantly to lose it by smaller margins than they have recently. But the idea that an amnesty is going to put Latinos squarely in the GOP tent is a fantasy.

Finally, somewhere inside the GOP may lie a faction that genuinely wants to represent Hispanic Americans and solve the nation’s immigration problem. Maybe they will succeed, or maybe the party will be happy just to have a plausible way to blame the Democrats when immigration reform fails yet again. We’ll see.

Guest workers. Most pundits are focusing on border security, but I think the detail most likely to sink the whole plan is how to handle “guest workers” — people we allow to enter the country to do a job, and then send back home without any chance for permanent residency or citizenship.

Guest workers make sense in two circumstances: if our need for workers is genuinely temporary (as it was when so many of our citizens were overseas fighting World War II), or if the workers themselves have no interest in staying. (A young Mexican might want to come north for the tomato harvest or to work in a kitchen for a year or so, and then go home with a little spending money.) But if we’re bringing in workers to fill a long-term need, then it should be up to them whether they want to stay and pursue citizenship. Otherwise we’re just giving the business community an exploitable working class that can’t vote.

The labor market. I am sick of hearing about “jobs Americans won’t do”. This is the only kind of market failure conservatives believe in. I believe that there are many jobs Americans won’t do for a Mexican wage, but there is a market-clearing wage that will get those jobs done in America by Americans.

People who believe in jobs-Americans-won’t-do point to the experience of Georgia and Alabama, where anti-immigrant laws resulted in crops rotting in the fields. To me, this is what would happen in any import-dominated market if imports (in this case, imported workers) were suddenly cut off. If we banned imports of, say, laptop computers, there would be a shortage in the stores until the domestic manufacturers tooled up. But that wouldn’t imply that “there are products American companies won’t make”.

What we found out in Georgia and Alabama is that low-skill work like harvesting vegetables isn’t no-skill work. You can’t take random people out of the unemployment line and expect them to have the required skill and stamina. Again, if you are paying an illegal-immigrant wage and people aren’t sure whether the immigrants will come back or not, native Alabamans and Georgians are not going to invest a lot of effort in improving their harvesting.

If growers had to pay an American wage to get their vegetables harvested, a lot of current arrangements wouldn’t make sense, and it would take a while for the market to adjust. (Maybe there are some crops that it doesn’t make sense to grow in America, or maybe consumers will have to get used to paying higher prices.) But many industries suffer cost shocks of one sort or another, and the market works it out eventually.

That’s exactly what markets are good at, as conservatives ought to know.

If we discover that we are generally short of workers after the market settles on an American wage for jobs currently being done by undocumented immigrants, then we need more documented immigrants who have the option of seeking citizenship, not guest workers.

… and we’re still talking about guns

which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Six weeks after Sandy Hook, the NRA still hasn’t managed to shut this down.

Different this time?

Increasingly, the NRA is having trouble defending itself and its minions, much less achieving its goals. Groups like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Mayor Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns (whose SuperPAC also has Mayor Bloomberg’s financial backing) are making politicians pay a price for their NRA A-rating. Here, CSGV goes after Georgia Democratic Congressman John Barrow, using footage from his own pro-gun campaign ad.

IndependenceUSA ran this ad against Debbie Halvorson, a candidate running in a special election congressional primary in Chicago:

In a debate, one of Halvorson’s rivals said, “I got an F (grade) from the NRA, something I’m proud of.”

This doesn’t work all over the country yet, but it doesn’t have to. In recent years, the NRA’s agenda has gotten support from representatives whose constituents lean the other way, just because there has been no perceived price to giving in to the powerful gun lobby. Now there is.

The NRA itself is facing an increasing level of criticism. Long-term, the most damaging charge is probably this one, taken from an article by Tim Dickinson in the current Rolling Stone:

Billing itself as the nation’s “oldest civil rights organization,” the NRA still claims to represent the interests of marksmen, hunters and responsible gun owners. But over the past decade and a half, the NRA has morphed into a front group for the firearms industry, whose profits are increasingly dependent on the sale of military-bred weapons like the assault rifles used in the massacres at Newtown and Aurora, Colorado.

On paper the NRA is governed by its members, but member-power is hard to exercise. NRA members did not, for example, elect their most visible spokesman, CEO Wayne LaPierre, who has served since 1991. He was chosen by a 76-member board. One-third of that board comes up for election each year, when members who have been paying dues for at least five years are presented with a slate of candidates chosen by a 10-member nominating committee (which I think is also chosen by the board). Theoretically it would be possible for the members to change leadership by electing write-in candidates, but in practice it’s hard to imagine. One charismatic reformer in one election couldn’t do it. A reform movement would have to field a slate of candidates over several years, and by the second year gun-industry money would pour into the incumbent campaigns.

Dickinson lays out the money trail, estimating that corporate donors like Ruger, Beretta, Browning, and Remington have given the NRA $52 million in recent years.

Much like elite funders of a major political party, these Golden Ringers enjoy top access to decision-makers at the NRA. Their interests, not the interest of the $35-a-year member, rule the roost. “They’ve got this base of true believers that they mail their magazines out to,” says policy analyst Diaz. “But the NRA is really about serving this elite.”

It’s one thing for a politician to point to an A-grade from the NRA as support from America’s sportsmen. It’ll be a different matter entirely if the public comes to see it as evidence that s/he has been bought by the firearms industry.

This kind of thing — turning an organization’s support into a negative — has happened before: Conservatives did it to the ACLU, most notably in the Dukakis/Bush race of 1988. ACORN was driven out of existence entirely. They’re trying — unsuccessfully, so far — to do the same to Planned Parenthood.

I can’t remember liberals ever pulling this trick off against a conservative organization. But it deserves to happen to anybody, it deserves to happen to the NRA.

Stephen King has written a very interesting piece called “Guns”. It’s available as a Kindle single for 99 cents, or Amazon Prime members can borrow it for free.

The most interesting section is when King discusses his own role in school shootings and what he did about it. As a teen-ager, he wrote a school-shooting novel called Rage. More than one school shooter, King discovered years later, had been reading Rage.

He does not apologize for writing it, because he believes it expresses a certain truth about the teen-boy experience. And he doesn’t believe that his novel “broke” the shooters; rather “they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken.”

Nonetheless he did take Rage off the market, because it’s an “accelerant”, as he puts it.

I didn’t pull Rage from publication because the law demanded it; I was protected under the First Amendment, and the law couldn’t demand it. I pulled it because in my judgment it was hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do.

Ultimately, King’s proposals are similar to President Obama’s: background checks, assault weapon ban, ban on large magazine clips, and so on. But what’s most interesting is how he imagines these changes coming about: Gun owners (like him) need to demand them — in spite of the NRA — because it’s the responsible thing to do.

The Atlantic takes on the argument that the Second Amendment is a defense against tyranny. When people make that claim, they’re usually picturing the Minutemen, who really were a “well-organized militia” accountable to the community. (They also didn’t have much to do with winning the Revolutionary War.) But self-selected gangs of armed civilians are only effective defenders of democracy in fantasies like Red Dawn.

The right parallel in American history isn’t Lexington and Concord in 1776, it’s Bleeding Kansas in 1856-58, when pro- and anti-slavery gunmen traded atrocities.

a citizen uprising at any point in the foreseeable future would probably not involve like-minded constitutionalists taking up arms to defend democracy and liberty. It would more likely be a matter of one aggrieved social group attacking another. And for the most criminal and vicious members of society, the rationale of “protecting” their own rights would be a convenient justification for straight-up looting, robbery, and bloodshed.

The week’s stupidest controversy happened after the New Republic asked President Obama “Have you ever fired a gun?” and Obama replied “Up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.”

Since this off-hand remark was apparently the most important thing happening in America, conservatives from Fox News to Congress to CNN’s Erin Burnett demanded proof. Even the WaPo’s fact-check column weighed in, as if this were a claim about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction or something.

“If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this?” asked Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. “Why have we not seen photos?” — a question that Jon Stewart rephrased as: “Why won’t the black man half the country lives in fear of release a picture of himself with a gun?”

Maybe they were hoping for another Dukakis-in-a-tank photo. But Obama doesn’t look too bad. BagNews (a blog focused on analyzing political imagery) comments:

the critics and conservatives have short-sightedly forced Obama into releasing one of the most advantageous photos of his presidency.

Are they happy now? Or can we expect Donald Trump and Sheriff Arpaio to declare the picture a fake? StoptheACLU.com notes that the photo was posted “after all the uproar” and says that in spite of the White House’s claims  “When this photo was taken is anybody’s guess.” Why didn’t I think of that? Obama must have flown someplace where the leaves are still green so that he could fake a photo to end this damaging “uproar”.

… and you also might be interested in …

Wednesday, the Sift’s most popular post of all time (“The Distress of the Privileged“) got its 200,000th page view.

As the fiscal debate shifts to the defense cuts in the looming sequester, it’s worth taking a look at how our defense spending compares with the rest of the world.

You’ll sometimes see a smaller number — something in the $525 billion range — but that’s just “core” defense spending. It leaves out the cost of the wars we’re fighting, plus defense-oriented spending that appears in the intelligence or energy budgets. Columbia Journalism Review lays out the range of numbers that have some claim to measure “defense spending”. Even the $711 billion pictured above leaves out stuff like military pensions.

If you watched the Super Bowl, maybe you saw an ad for SodaStream, the company that wants you to save money and the environment by carbonating your own water, adding flavorings yourself, and reusing the same bottles many times.

But you didn’t see this cute ad, because CBS censored it, apparently because it directly makes fun of Coke and Pepsi, who are much bigger CBS advertisers.

It was OK for Pepsi to make fun of Coke in past Super Bowl ads, but that’s Goliath-on-Goliath action. In the “free” market (where CBS is “free” to censor ads it doesn’t want to show), Davids have to play by different rules. If you want a marketplace where everybody plays by the same rules … that requires government regulation. And (as we all know) regulation kills “freedom”.

Be careful what “news” articles you share on Facebook; the satire at The Daily Currant is getting harder and harder to separate from real life. I was almost fooled by Lehman Brothers CEO Arrested For Accounting Fraud, and the headlines Ann Coulter Refuses to Board Airplane With Black Pilot and Rush Limbaugh Denied Service at Mexican Restaurant are kinda-sorta plausible (especially if you never liked those two anyway). As you get deeper into the stories, though, you ought to catch on — like when Tim Pawlenty is quoted saying this about the Lehman arrest:

“I don’t mind being tough on crime. But I would prefer if the government stuck to prosecuting black and Latino people for drug offenses.”

But the pastor who stiffed the waitress at Applebee’s — that really happened. And the story just keeps getting worse.

It wasn’t enough for Pastor Alois Bell to cross out the 18% automatic tip that Applebee’s computer generates for large parties. (The $34.93 is Bell’s part of a split check, not the total.) It wasn’t even enough to add “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” and append “Pastor” to her signature.

When a photo of the ticket went viral on Reddit and the story was picked up by news sites all over the country, Bell had a chance to turn the other cheek, or maybe even treat the waitress to a Triple Chocolate Meltdown and see if they can’t laugh about this together now that it’s in the past. I mean, WWJD?

[OK, Jesus probably wouldn’t stiff a waitress and then brag about tithing in the first place, but WWJD is supposed to apply to all kinds of situations Jesus would never get into.]

We all picture Jesus in our own ways, but I doubt he would call Applebee’s and demand that everyone responsible for the embarrassment be fired, as Bell did. So the $3.50-an-hour waitress who photographed and posted the check (not the stiffed waitress, at least) is out on the street. I’m sure that will solve Bell’s public relations problem.

Fortunately for Pastor Bell, her God is more merciful than she is. A less forgiving deity might demand that everyone responsible for His embarrassment be “fired”.

I don’t watch HBO’s Girls. I tried in Season 1, but I’m not young enough, female enough, or New Yorky enough to get into it.

But Season 2 has sparked some fascinating discussion of Lena Dunham’s nude scenes. Now, naked women on HBO is old news. (Game of Thrones rarely makes it through half an episode without somebody’s breasts getting into the picture somehow.) But unlike the babes of Westeros, Dunham doesn’t have the kind of body you see in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She looks … the way the rest of American 20-somethings look without their clothes.

Apparently that’s a problem for some people. And their problem is an interesting topic for the rest of us. The Independent’s Nat Guest (a woman) writes:

there’s something progressive – almost revolutionary, in fact – about the approach to nudity in Girls. Rather than being sexualised flesh, designed to titillate, this is matter-of-fact flesh; uninhibited flesh that owns its own sexuality, and reminds us that there can be other reasons for nudity other than satisfying the male gaze.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nahisi Coates (a man) described Girls as

one of the most democratic – and everyhuman – depictions of sex to ever exist in pop culture. The more I thought about this, the more important it became to me.

This head-slapping video demonstrates that we’ve all been using Chinese take-out containers wrong.

What does “white privilege” mean? It means being able to carry a nice TV a few blocks to your friend’s house after dark — without worrying how you’ll look to the police. What does “Christian privilege” mean? Crystal St. Marie Lewis explains:

For Christians in America, religious privilege means boarding an airplane while holding their Bibles in plain view without incurring suspicion. The same isn’t true for people who “look like” Muslims in our country.

Privilege is seldom the kind of thing that makes you strut around thinking, “Damn, I’m privileged.” Usually it’s the stuff that you can do without thinking about it at all — and other people have to be very careful about.

Since I’m unlikely to make it to Kamchatka myself, AirPano watches the erupting volcanoes for me.

Spiegel explains how remarkable this is:

Given that volcano experts don’t believe that the four volcanoes are being fed from the same magma source, the parallel eruptions would seem to be the geological equivalent of winning the lottery.

And finally, can you watch an Oscar-nominated romantic comedy in six and a half minutes? Yes, you can.

February 4, 2013 – 12:38 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

You know what’s really striking about this week’s political news? We’re talking about stuff we ought to be talking about: Immigration was at the top of the list this week, and the gun discussion keeps gaining momentum. I don’t know if the Right has stopped pushing faux-outrage issues (like Obama’s birth certificate or vote fraud) or if they just can’t get traction.

It’s throwing me off a little. One of the questions that helps me put the Sift together each week is “What should people be paying attention to?” When people are paying attention to many of the things they should, I’m not sure what to do.

So this week’s Sift is about immigration, guns, and a bunch of short notes. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) deserves to be broken out as a separate article.

February 4, 2013 – 8:00 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Here On Earth

History tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

— Barack Obama, Second Inaugural Address

This week everybody was talking about the inauguration and the second term

I cover President Obama’s speech itself — the best of his presidency — in President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America. Short version: There are two ways, fundamentalist and progressive, to turn history into myth. We’re used to hearing the Tea Party tell the story of America as a fundamentalist myth. In the 2nd Inaugural, Obama told it as a progressive myth.

Naturally, conservatives were offended.

… and filibuster reform

which didn’t happen. Or rather, it sort of happened, but not so you’d notice.

There are several problems with the filibuster as it existed in the last Congress.

  • 41 senators could keep 59 senators from accomplishing anything. That hasn’t been changed and wouldn’t have changed even under the Udall/Merkley reform proposals that Reid watered down.
  • Far less than 41 senators could stop 60+ senators from accomplishing things that aren’t worth making a big deal over. The process for ending a filibuster was so cumbersome that (even if the votes were there), the majority leader might decide that it wasn’t worth the Senate’s time. The Reid/McConnell compromise (which passed overwhelmingly), streamlines this process. So the monkey-wrenching power of a handful of senators has gone down.
  • Filibustering had very little political price. Udall/Merkley would have changed this, but Reid/McConnell doesn’t. In the very old-fashioned “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” filibuster, senators had to take the floor and keep speaking. It was an endurance test, but more than that it gave the press something to cover. The majority of the electorate (who often agree with the majority of the Senate being thwarted by the filibuster) could see exactly who was standing in their way. But the more recent version of the filibuster was largely procedural and hence invisible. The press often covered filibusters in the passive voice; bills “were blocked”. Sometimes even the fact of the filibuster wasn’t covered; the press just took for granted that 60 votes were needed to pass anything in the Senate, as if that were in the Constitution.

So we got only the reforms that make the majority leader’s life easier. Harry Reid described the old system this way:

I want to go to it on a Monday, they make me file cloture, that takes till Tuesday. Then it takes two days for the cloture vote to ‘ripen,’ so now it’s Thursday, and even if I get 60 votes, they still have 30 hours to twiddle their thumbs, pick their nose, do whatever they want. So, I’m not on the bill by the weekend, and in reality, that means next Monday or Tuesday.

That’s the part that he thinks he’s fixed.

As if in a political novel, a federal appeals court immediately made it clear why filibuster reform is necessary by throwing out President Obama’s recess appointments of officials whose nominations had been filibustered. In particular, everything the National Labor Relations Board did in 2012 is now suspect, because without the recess appointments it didn’t have a quorum to act.

If the Supreme Court upholds the appeals court ruling, President Obama (and future presidents) will have no recourse if 41 senators decide to obstruct the normal functioning of government using an strategy that had no precedent before the Republicans began using it against Obama.

Throughout American history, the Senate’s constitutional power to “advise and consent” to presidential nominations had been applied individually: On the rare occasions when a nominee was rejected, it was because of a scandal or some other reason unique to that particular person. But Obama’s nominations have been blocked strategically. He can’t get new members appointed to the NRLB or put someone in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because Republicans don’t want those bodies to function. It’s nothing personal; Jesus Christ could not be confirmed as head of the CFPB.

So if you are trying to form a union right now and your company fights you in illegal ways, you don’t have much recourse because we don’t have a valid NLRB you can appeal to. Republicans haven’t and couldn’t raise the votes to repeal our labor laws, but they can monkey-wrench the parts of government that enforce those laws.

This is a tactic that the American people would recognize as illegitimate if it came to their attention, as it would if Republicans had to mount an old-fashioned Mr. Smith filibuster. In that case, some group of senators would have to be the faces of the filibuster, appearing on TV as the people who are making our government not work. Democracy would have a chance to correct the problem.

But even that reform was too much to ask for.

… and Hillary Clinton’s testimony about Benghazi

from which we learned essentially nothing. Neither Republicans nor Democrats showed any interest in figuring out how to prevent future Benghazis. Republicans played to their conspiracy-theory-loving base, and Democrats buttered up a possible future president. Jon Stewart covered the hearing with an appropriate level of disgust.

The most over-the-top statement came from Rand Paul, who called Benghazi “the worst tragedy since 9-11“. Apparently he slept through the entire Iraq War.

Clinton came out untouched. Feministing says her performance was a model of how to deal with mansplaining.

and you also might be interested in …

Here’s where we’ve gotten in the same-sex marriage argument: The lawyers in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Prop 8 are arguing that opposite-sex couples pose a unique threat to society, because they can produce “unplanned and unintended offspring”. According to the LA Times:

they argue that it is reasonable for the law to steer opposite-sex couples toward marriage, including by giving them extra benefits. “It was rational for Congress to draw the line where it did,” Clement said, “because the institution of marriage arose in large measure in response to the unique social difficulty that opposite-sex couples, but not same-sex couples, posed.”

Got that, gays and lesbians? You can’t get the benefits of marriage because your potential promiscuity is less socially disruptive than when straights sleep around. By June we’ll find out whether the Supreme Court finds this argument persuasive.

It looks like the debt ceiling won’t be an issue until the middle of May. Obama stood firm and Boehner blinked.

In last summer’s post “I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To“, points 5 and 6 were “Ryan’s reputation as a deficit hawk is undeserved” and “He’s not as smart as he thinks he is.” Well, his interview with Ezra Klein Wednesday proved both.

Slate’s Richard Hasen thinks the Republican plan to gerrymander the Electoral College won’t come to anything. I want to believe his argument, but it depends on Republicans either (i) deciding that they believe in democracy, or (ii) realizing that the American people do. If they turn out to be both evil and clueless, they’ll go through with it. (At least in Virginia, they’re backing down.)

But they’re bragging about having held onto the House in spite of the voting public. A Republican memo crows about the Party’s gerrymandering prowess:

Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.

I do agree with one of Hasen’s points: That Republicans are considering this plan at all shows that they realize conservatism is unpopular. They wouldn’t need to plot how to win with a minority if they believed the majority of the American people agree with them.

At his confirmation hearing last week, Secretary of State nominee John Kerry didn’t dodge on climate change.

You want to do business and do well in America? We’ve got to get into the energy race. Other countries are in it… This is a place for us to recognize what other countries are doing and what our states that are growing are doing, which is there’s an extraordinary amount of opportunity in modernizing America’s energy grid.

“Other countries are doing it.” Solar panels over irrigation canals generate power, conserve water (by reducing evaporation), don’t occupy crop land, and create jobs. America could do stuff like this, if we were an advanced country like India.

Occasionally we do stuff here: My wife’s home town is pioneering the smart grid.

Grist thanks Donald Trump for saying such stupid things about global warming that straw men are not necessary.

You know why the climate-denier movement won’t die? Dark money.

TPM founder Josh Marshall doesn’t like the way almost every anti-gun-violence article starts “I’m a gun owner, but …” He doesn’t own a gun, doesn’t want to own a gun, has never shot a gun, and figures that makes him representative of about half the country. Why should that point of view be left out of the discussion?

Last week I talked about how Republicans in Congress turned against their own ideas as soon as Obama proposed them. Now that trend may be reversing in a strange way: Republicans may reclaim their ideas and just refuse to recognize that Obama ever proposed them. If Obama plays along, something might get done.

The test case is immigration reform, where Marco Rubio is proposing something remarkably similar to the plan Obama borrowed from George W. Bush.

Last week I also called your attention to the idea of a “false flag operation”, which is a staple of paranoid conspiracy theories, particularly the ones where the government is conspiring to take our guns.

Well, occasionally liberals believe in false flag operations too: Here’s Rachel Maddow speculating that an anti-Chuck-Hagel ad by anonymous “liberals” is actually a conservative ad in disguise.

I had to get this in before football is over for the year.

And finally, this mystical city appears out of the fog once every hundred years. No, wait, it’s Vancouver.

January 28, 2013 – 1:04 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America

What made President Obama’s Second Inaugural the best speech of his presidency was its great theme: He told the story of America as progressives understand it, and connected it with the progressive mission today.

In recent years, liberals have let conservatives own the big-picture story of America. If you hear somebody talking about the Founders and the Constitution, probably it’s Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul or some other hero of the self-styled “patriots” of the Tea Party.

Liberals have been more comfortable talking about peace and justice in the here and now: How are we going to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan? What can we do about levels of inequality last seen in the Gilded Age? How are we going to stop gun violence? How can we make sure that the sick, the old, and the disabled get the care they need? Can we stop profit-privatizing/risk-socializing bankers from crashing the economy again? And so on.

Facts vs. visions. I believe liberals actively shy away from this big-picture mythologizing because of our disgust at how conservatives abuse it: They must talk about their grand vision, because when you get down to the nitty-gritty of facts, they are just plain wrong. Rape causes pregnancy. The globe is warming. The rich are getting all the money. The economy has a demand problem. Taxes are low, spending is not out of control, and the federal government can’t go bankrupt.

Let Glenn Beck spin stories about the last 5,000 years, we’d rather point to things that are actually happening and say, “Look! Look!”

And yet … “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Without some larger context, day-to-day political efforts can seem meaningless. Why waste your energy? Make a nice dinner for your family. See a movie. Get ready for that thing at work. The immediate benefits of those efforts are clear. Politics? Not so much.

If conservatives offer their followers a role in the drama of History and we don’t, we will never match their intensity. Worse, by not offering a larger vision, we can seem to consent to the conservative narrative, in which “socialists” from FDR to LBJ to Obama have usurped the “libertarian” Republic of the Founders.

But progressives have their own story of America, and can offer a different role in the drama of History.

Progressive vs. fundamentalist mythology. In general, there are two main ways — fundamentalist and progressive — to turn history into a motivating myth. The generic Fundamentalist Myth begins with a Golden Age of divinely inspired prophets and larger-than-life heroes. From there, we devolved and corrupted their legacy. But deep inside our fallen shells glows the same spark that burned so brightly in them. So if we stoke fire of greatness and scour away the rust of corruption, we can recreate the world they meant for us to have.

a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night

The Progressive Myth reveres its past in a different way. Our legacy consists not of perfect past to which we should strive to return, but of a vision that has shone through the ages, always just out of reach, and of a journey towards that vision.

The Biblical motif is not the Garden of Eden, the Davidic Kingdom, or the Apostolic Church, but the Israelites wandering through the desert: We were slaves in Egypt when Moses gave us — not Freedom — but a vision of Freedom and the hope of a Promised Land. God is with us not as a once-and-future King, but as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, wordlessly marking the direction of our march. We move forward because the only permanent encampment behind us is Pharaoh’s.

It is not hard to see the Fundamentalist Myth in the Tea Party’s version of American history. The Founders are prophets, and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are scripture.

But the Progressive Myth can also apply to American history. And like so much liberal/conservative disagreement, the progressive version stays closer to the facts.

The Second Inaugural Address. President Obama began his speech with the holiest words in the American canon:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

But that was not the establishment of a Golden Age to which we must return. It was the start of a journey with no turning back.

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

That journey has had two pieces: Change that became necessary as circumstances changed, and change that became necessary as we reached a clearer vision of the meaning of our founding principles. And so our journey included the abolition of slavery

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

the construction of modern infrastructure from the Erie Canal to the interstate highways

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.

the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt’s creation of the SEC and other modern regulatory bodies

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.

These are not corruptions or usurpations of the Founders’ dream, but its continuing realization.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone.

And we are not done yet.

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity — until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.

That is our generation’s task — to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

Looked at with clear eyes, American history is meaningful only as a place to be from, not a place to go back to. Where would you go? To the slave plantations? To Jim Crow? To the Trail of Tears? To the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory? To Love Canal? To marriages where wives own no property and have rights only through their husbands? To a time when old age and poverty were practically synonymous? Where?

As a nation, we can rightfully take pride in the challenges we have overcome, but not in where we have been. To go back, to give up all that progress, would betray our revolutionary heritage. Our forebears kept moving forward, and so will we.

January 28, 2013 – 10:34 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Barack Obama gave the best speech of his presidency last Monday at the Inauguration. He put the Tea Party on notice that they don’t own the Founders or the story of America.

In today’s lead article, I’ll spell out the two main ways to turn history into a motivating myth. The Tea Party tells a fundamentalist myth about the founding of America, full of larger-than-life heroes and prophets whose achievement we have corrupted and degraded. Their program then revolves around repentance for our socialist sins in hopes of returning to the Founders’ Eden.

In the Second Inaugural, Obama told a progressive myth of American history: The Founders left us not a perfect Republic, but a vision that neither they nor anyone since has fully achieved. We are on a centuries-long journey towards that Promised Land, and our journey will not be complete until everyone has the liberty that the Founders managed to guarantee to straight white male Christian property owners.

In the weekly summary, I’ll also describe how the Senate wimped out on filibuster reform, and why that might have very immediate consequences. (That piece is still growing and may turn into its own article.) Also: a strange new legal argument against same-sex marriage, Kerry’s bold testimony on climate change, Republicans might fail to gerrymander the Electoral College, and Bad Lip Reading takes on the NFL.

January 28, 2013 – 8:16 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)