The Yearly Sift: 2012

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

review all the Sift quotes of 2012

This week everybody was talking about …

The last two weeks will get a very abbreviated treatment so that I can use the space to review the year. I’m sure the gun debate will still be going on next Monday — probably the stand-offs on the fiscal cliff and the debt limit too — so I’ll catch up then. But I wanted to share this Clay Bennett cartoon.

There were also countless end-of-the-year top ten lists. The most ambitious is Time’s Top Ten Everything of 2012. Time’s #8 Viral Video of the Year was the best marriage proposal ever:

But let’s get on with reviewing the year.

This year, everybody was talking about the election

Like my imaginary typical reader, I struggled not to obsess and not to let my fears get ahead of the facts. But just about every week, something election-related was a major focus.

Looking back, I feel like the Sift mostly got the election right. True, the weakness of the Republican field surprised me. (So much for my April, 2011 prediction that Romney wouldn’t be nominated.) And I also failed to predict Obama’s sleep-walk through the first debate, which let Romney get back into the race. But I decided early to trust Nate Silver’s poll-consolidation model, which turned out to be right. All in all, I think a regular Sift reader went through the campaign focused on the right things: the right issues, the right narratives, the right swing states.

The election also turned out more-or-less the way I wanted, which has left me feeling more relieved than triumphant. Watching congressional Republicans run scared from the most extreme part of their base, I can only imagine what we’d be looking at if President Romney and a Republican Senate were about to take office. So I’m not seeing the dawn of a new era, but we did dodge a bullet.

A more detailed look at the Sift’s election coverage is in Looking Back at the 2012 Election: Relief, not Triumph.

… and I kept writing about privilege

The Theme of the Year always sneaks up on me; I never start out with one in mind. But all year, the news kept pushing me to write about various sorts of discrimination and/or prejudice: against blacks, Hispanics, women, Muslims, gays, students, retirees, the working class … almost everybody, when you total it up.

In each of those apparently separate stories, I kept finding the same thing: a privileged group so oblivious to its privileges and so clueless about what life is like for everyone else that it imagines itself as the true victim. So the rich feel “punished” by the prospect of paying Clinton-era tax rates or admitting that their businesses are built on the foundation of a healthy public sector. Christians feel “persecuted” when they aren’t allowed to control the public square or dictate how their employees use health insurance. The Trayvon Martin case caused whites to obsess about violence by blacks. And countless Americans believe that we are the great unappreciated benefactors of the countries we invade or bomb or exploit for cheap labor. (Why aren’t the Iraqis grateful for all we’ve done?)

Like most liberals, my first impulse was to write this off as posturing — meaningless noise meant to drown out any discussion of genuine unfairness. But the deeper I looked, the more sincere these voices sounded. And if you listen to them, you’ll hear reasons: examples where change has robbed them of privileges they had come to expect, or inflicted inconveniences on them that (in their minds) loom as large as Jim Crow or the Trail of Tears.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that you can’t just ignore their distress, because it feels so real to them. If you do, they conclude that “empathy” is some kind of pan-handler’s con — because here they are, suffering, and you don’t care. So my new strategy is to acknowledge their distress, and then put it in context. As in: “I’ll bet that sunburn really hurts. Hey, look — that guy over there is bleeding out. You think maybe the doctor should see him first?”

In September all that came together for me in a post that has become the most popular Weekly Sift article of all time: The Distress of the Privileged. (172,000 page views and still going.)

… and some other stuff

The Sift reviewed, recommended, or based an article on 21 different books this year. I’ve collected the links. (In general, if you’re ever looking for a Sift book review and can’t remember where it is, check the Yearly Sifts at the end of each December.)

Religion is one of the lesser themes just about every year. I’ve always paid attention to the bad public policy pushed by the Religious Right, but this year I started taking the battle to them rather than just responding to their latest outrage: The Religious Right isn’t just bad policy, it’s bad religion. They do a bad job following their own holy book.

So, for example, if they’re going to take Leviticus seriously on social issues, why don’t they also promote The Economics of Leviticus, which is decided liberal? How about a Jubilee Year, where we cancel all the debts?

In a related post, I pointed out how incompatible certain conservative philosophies are with the message of Jesus in Jesus Shrugged: Why Christianity and Ayn Rand Don’t Mix.

I addressed abortion from a personal point of view in What Abortion Means to Me, and I honored Natural Family Planning Awareness Week by reading the papal encyclical at the root of Catholic condemnation of contraception, Humanae Vitae. I concluded:

So yes, Catholics, use this week to educate yourself about the Church’s teaching on contraception. You will find it based on shoddy thinking. To attribute these ideas to God is blasphemous.

And I responded to Senate-candidate Richard Mourdock’s opinions about rape and God’s will by explaining the vision of the Founders in Government Theology is Un-American.

If Congressman Mourdock wants to interpret the will of God to the People, he should move to a country where government officials do that, and leave my country alone.

Both that post and Five Takeaways from the Komen Fiasco wound up talking about ensoulment, noting that ensoulment-at-conception is not at all Biblical. Sometime in 2013 I plan to focus an article on this point rather than have it in footnotes of other posts: Ensoulment-at-conception has zero Biblical support; it’s a theological interpretation invented purely for political reasons.

Economics is another perennial theme. This year I made the personal political in What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism, corrected previous mistakes in Peak Oil? Maybe not, made a liberal case for capitalism in Take a Left at the Market, and filled in a piece of the puzzle I had previously been missing in Monopoly’s Role in Inequality.

A new issue I started covering this year is food policy: See Food-eaters are not a special interest group, When the food industry inspects itself, and my review of Bet the Farm.

A few articles didn’t fit into any larger theme, but I want to call them to your attention anyway:

I went out on a limb with a long-range prediction: Everybody Will Support Same-sex Marriage by 2030.

If you came out of Lincoln wondering why the Republicans were the Northern progressive party then, but the Southern conservative party now, it’s all laid in A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System.

And finally, the best post nobody read was The Republic of Babel.

And what do the numbers look like?

Not much different from last year, but the blog weathered a storm to get there. The lack of viral posts (explained below) made for dismal numbers in the spring.

Last year, the Sift received 137K page views in the 6 months after I moved it to weeklysift.com. This year it got 240K in a complete year. Once again, it was a story of viral posts. Last year, five posts got over 2,500 views each, totaling 107K — everything else split the remaining 30K page views. This year, only one post (The Distress of the Privileged) went over 2,500, but it’s gotten 172K views and counting, with everything else splitting 72K views.

On the other hand, this year 8 posts got 1000-2000 views, compared to none last year. The difference seems to have more to do with changes at Facebook (which I don’t completely understand) than anything I’m doing differently. This year, not everything you “like” is seen by all your friends; last year it was. So it’s now much harder for a post to go viral. Last year, 800 views was a launching point; if a post got there, it stood a good chance of running to 5K or 10K. Not so this year.

Other numbers: The Sift’s Facebook page has 183 Likes and its Twitter feed has 123 followers. The blog has 504 followers via WordPress, and 280 subscribers via Google Reader. I wish I had recorded those numbers last year so I could give some context, but I believe they are all significantly up.

December 31, 2012 – 9:43 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Looking Back at the 2012 Election: Relief, not Triumph

On the whole, my feeling coming out of the election was less a sense of triumph than of disaster averted. At various points in the process, the Republican electorate appeared ready to unite behind a charming dunce (Rick Perry), a lunatic (Michele Bachmann), a huckster (Herman Cain), a race-baiter and Islamophobe (Newt Gingrich), or a Christian supremacist (Rick Santorum) before actually nominating a guy no one actually believed in. Mitt Romney united the party around a pure drive to take power away from the Socialist Black Guy, a drive unsullied by any genuine principles or plans beyond repealing everything the SBG has done.

Again and again, my reaction was not so much “I hope we win this argument” as “I can’t believe we’re talking about this”. We argued about contraception, about whether anti-abortion laws should have a rape exception, and about how best to cut rich people’s taxes in the face of trillion-dollar deficits. The Republican candidates did not debate global warming, because they all agreed that it either isn’t happening or (if it maybe-sorta is) the government shouldn’t do anything to slow it down. Americans who have begun drawing money out of the programs they’ve been contributing to for decades were denounced as “takers” and Romney despaired that “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Republicans tried to build their convention around an Obama “gaffe”: his recognition of the obvious fact that private enterprise is only possible in the context of a healthy public sector. (Imagine if they’d been running against Ben Franklin, who “gaffed” like this in 1789: “Private Property therefore is a Creature of Society, and is subject to the Calls of that Society, whenever its Necessities shall require it, even to its last Farthing; its Contributions therefore to the public Exigencies are not to be considered as conferring a Benefit on the Publick, entitling the Contributors to the Distinctions of Honour and Power, but as the Return of an Obligation previously received, or the Payment of a just Debt.”)

So: rape-minimizing senate candidates lost, a vast quantity of dark money failed in its mission, and an unprecedented level of cynicism and brazen lying did not sway the public. As a result, we won’t go back to Bush economic policies. We might manage to keep our actual Constitution rather than let an ultra-conservative Supreme Court replace it with a charter of corporate rights. The safety net might be saved. Abortion might continue to be legal. And we might avoid the next unnecessary war. Maybe.

Feel triumphant?

So how did the Sift do covering the election? Looking back, I’m pleased. (OK, I’m embarrassed by my early 2011 predictions that “Mitt Romney will not be nominated” and “At some point it’s going to come down to Bachmann against one or two other Republican candidates,” but we’re just talking about 2012, right?) April’s The Narratives of November was a reasonable preview of the fall campaign, and the Sift was an early and consistent proponent of the view that somebody eventually summed up as “keep calm and trust Nate Silver”. As in 2008, my hour-by-hour projection of election night was imperfect but pretty good — concluding (correctly) with “Obama wins by midnight.”

Ryan. The Sift’s most noteworthy election coverage was my Paul Ryan trilogy:  In the avalanche of coverage that followed Ryan’s selection of Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate, I sifted out the ten points that seemed most important in I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To. I didn’t want Ryan to get away with the trick the Tea Party pulled in 2010 — focusing everybody’s attention on budget deficits and hiding an extreme culture-war agenda until after the election — so I followed the next week with Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women. And finally, I used my own history as an Ayn Rand follower to illuminate Ryan’s worldview in Ayn, Paul, and Me.

Truthiness. Political scientist Norman Ornstein says that “the great unreported big story of American politics” this year was the Romney campaign’s unprecedented level of cynicism and contempt for truth — the culmination of a trend David Roberts labeled “post-truth politics” and summed up like this:

Political campaigns have always lied and stretched the truth, but when caught in a lie, would typically defend themselves (claim it was actually true), retract, or at the very least stop repeating the lie. Either way, the presumption was that truth-telling had some moral force; one ought to tell the truth, even if that commandment was often honored in the breach.

What’s creepy about the Romney crew is that they don’t do any of those things. They don’t deny, they don’t stop, they just don’t care at all.

But instead of covering this story, the mainstream media’s worship of “balance” led them to devalue accuracy; writing both-sides-do-it articles was much easier and safer than pointing out what was really happening. That’s why Jay Rosen called this “a story too big to tell”.

I was already on that story last year: The Sift’s Theme of 2011 was Escape from Bizarro World, and I spelled out the nuts-and-bolts of how it works in Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation. A regular subject of my campaign coverage this year was the media meta-discussion about how to cover lies.

In addition, I did my usual periodic debunking: Four Fantasy Issues of the Right; Barack X, the fictional president; The Return of Death Panels; Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide; followed by the post-election Repainting the Bubble.

And while it didn’t take a great genius to see in April that the fall campaign would be about negative ads and bogus gaffes rather than the real challenges that face this country, I’m still proud of the agenda I laid out for the candidates in Seven Issues the Election Should Be About. Politics should still be focused on those seven issues, and rarely is. After the conventions, I laid out Obama’s Positive Case, which wasn’t too far off the case he eventually made.

On the other hand, I totally didn’t foresee that Obama would screw up the first debate and give Romney a chance to catch up.

The Weekly Sift is a liberal blog — I’ve never pretended otherwise — so in October I campaigned for Obama in articles like Convincing Friends to Vote for Obama and Sorry Jill, I’m not voting Green.

Post-election, I’ve been resisting the spin that the Republican House has a mandate to resist Obama’s agenda by pointing out that they got fewer votes than Democratic House candidates and owe their majority to gerrymandering.

2013? So what will politics bring us in 2013? In spite of the post-election optimism that Republicans will stop obstructing everything Obama tries to do (since he’s already been re-elected and can’t run again), I’m not seeing it.

The “alternative knowledge system” (i.e., fantasy world) that David Frum pointed to is still in the driver’s seat in the GOP. 2012 was not a big enough disaster to kill it. One of my primary predictive principles is: Trends that can only end one way will end that way. The GOP won’t stand up to its extreme right wing until it is facing total destruction. So it will face total destruction. Just yesterday:

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said that holding the line against raising taxes on high-income households while fighting for cuts to Social Security was “not a winning hand.”

Ya think? What kind of party needs an elder statesman to point that out?

So I predict this will be the story of politics in 2013: How destructive will the Tea Party faction in Congress have to get before mainstream Republicans realize their party faces extinction?

December 31, 2012 – 8:26 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Sifted Books of 2012

This year the Sift reviewed, recommended, or based an article on 21 different books.

Novels: 11/22/63 by Stephen King, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

Religion/spirituality: Flunking Sainthood by Jana Reiss, The New Religious Intolerance by Martha Nussbaum, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John Barry, Sacred Ground by Eboo Patel, Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans

American politics/policy/political history: Rule and Ruin by Geoffrey Kabaservice, Delirium: How the sexual counter-revolution is polarizing America by Nancy Cohen, Drift by Rachel Maddow, With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald, Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig, Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes

Economics: Cornered by Barry Lynn, End This Depression Now by Paul Krugman

Deep history/anthropology/why-people-are-the-way-they-are: Catching Fire: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, The Myth of Choice by Kurt Greenfield

What the Founders intended: Wrong and Dangerous by Garrett Epps, Common as Air by Lewis Hyde

Food policy: Bet the Farm by Frederick Kaufman

December 31, 2012 – 6:31 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (1)

The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s time for the Yearly Sift, when I go back and take the longer view of what I’ve been doing week-by-week in 2012. The Story of the Year, of course, was the election, and I’m going to claim that the Sift did a reasonably good job helping its readers pay attention to the right things and not freak out over every outlying poll or surge by the Republican candidate-of-the-week.

The Theme of the Year was privilege. It was all summed up by September’s “The Distress of the Privileged“, the Weekly Sift’s most popular post ever. But those ideas came together because they had been brewing all year long. And there were a few lesser themes, like religion and economics.

I’ll also list the 21 books the Sift either reviewed or recommended this year, with links to what I said about them. And I’ve collected all those pithy little quotes that have led off each week.

December 31, 2012 – 6:27 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

No Sift on Christmas Eve

Celebrate whatever holiday makes you happy, then come back next Monday for the annual Yearly Sift, in which I almost always discover (retrospectively) that what I’ve been writing this year has a theme.

December 24, 2012 – 9:00 am Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Enough?

As a country we have been through this too many times. 

— President Barack Obama responding to the Newtown school shooting

This week everybody was talking gun violence

We had two mass shootings: the Clackamas Town Center Mall shooting just outside of Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

I’m not going to compile my own account of either event; that’s something the mainstream media has done at great length. I do want to make a few one-step-back comments.

1. Don’t put too much stock in early accounts and explanations. A review of Dave Cullen’s book Columbine. observes:

Cullen goes into extensive detail about just how wrong the news reports were, not only in the immediate aftermath but for months and years afterward. … [M]ost of the inaccuracies sprung from the nature of on-the-spot, live, eyewitness reporting. The massacre itself lasted barely an hour, but news helicopters circled overhead with no information all day. That’s a lot of time to fill.

Already by Thursday, Slate’s William Saletan was debunking early Clackamas reports:

Thanks to mobile phones, Twitter, and instant publishing, you can read all about the latest mass shooting within minutes. But much of what you’re reading, even days afterward, is false.

There’s no shame in carrying a bunch of false information in your head. Everybody does. But before you use events like this to support your Big Theory of Everything, double-check that the details you’re relying on are real.

2. This is becoming normal.

The Nation lists 16 mass shootings in 2012, about one every three weeks. That list includes the Dark Knight massacre in Aurora, Colorado and the Sikh Temple massacre outside of Milwaukee. Mother Jones provides a map, the graph above, and a list going back 30 years.

3. “Let’s not politicize this tragedy” is itself partisan rhetoric.

This point became a separate post. (And Ezra Klein made the same point: “Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not.”) Let me also combine it with the previous point: If we can’t discuss gun control in the wake of a shooting, and if shootings happen every three weeks, then we can never discuss it.

4. Gun violence isn’t just a legal problem, it’s a cultural problem.

Think about cigarettes. When I was a kid (in the Mad Men era), smoking had a glamorous, sophisticated image. Cigarettes never became illegal, but a considerable amount of effort went into making them unfashionable. It worked, and I think that has had a lot to do with smoking’s overall decline.

Now envision a future America where owning a military-grade arsenal isn’t considered manly. Even with the same laws, I’ll bet it would have a lot fewer guns and a lot less gun violence.

5. Gun violence is also a mental health issue.

Dave Cullen believes that about half of mass shooters have depression problems. (Literally true at Columbine: One shooter was a sociopath and the other depressed.) Screening high school students for depression and getting treatment for the ones who need it could prevent a lot of future violence.

Unfortunately, the cut-government-spending drumbeat pushes in exactly the opposite direction. Detecting and treating teen depression is easily branded a “nanny state” policy.

… and this is also is worth your attention

Jonathan Chait explains Why Republicans Can’t Propose Spending Cuts.

When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.

They need Obama to propose the cuts, so they can accuse him of protecting all the real waste, which their propaganda says has to exist.

How can a humor magazine cover tragedy? By telling the unvarnished truth that the rest of the media varnishes, as the Onion did after the recent mall shooting: “Fuck Everything, Nation Reports: Just Fuck It All To Hell“. How many people do you think had that thought this week? And did anyone else report it?

A humanist cadet resigned to protest the unconstitutional Christian evangelism that West Point condones.

Dan Froomkin: The media missed “the biggest story of the 2012 campaign”:

the [Republican] party’s most central campaign principles — that federal spending doesn’t create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit — willfully disregarded the truth.

A Unitarian Universalist minister responds to Lindsey Graham’s insistence that same-sex marriage should require a constitutional amendment:

The Constitution does not state that anyone has a right to marry. … Men and women have been marrying each other in this country for over 200 years without the Constitution saying a word about their right to do so.

… and finally

If you have a tradition of giving money away during the holidays, think about adding journalism to your list of good causes. I’m planning to send a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, whose Wikipedia I use many times every day. Also Grist, where most of the Sift’s environmental coverage comes from.

Journalism’s broken business model means that a lot of advertising-accepting publications are essentially charities now, even if they look like businesses. The Nation is a consistent money-loser that couldn’t survive without Nation Builders, a voluntary association of its readers. Mother Jones is published by the Foundation for National Progress and accepts donations.

DailyKos, the largest liberal online community, is free to use and accepts advertising, but would also like to get voluntary subscriptions or donations.

If you want to promote a possible future for journalism, take a look at the Banyan Project, which was started by my friend (and former editor) Tom Stites.

The Weekly Sift itself falls on the hobby side of the job/hobby line I defined last spring, so I’m not looking for donations. It just costs me time, and I enjoy doing it.

December 17, 2012 – 1:01 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask

Holiday gatherings bring together people of all political persuasions, so you’re likely to hear a variety of Fox News talking points. If you’re unprepared, you usually wind up with a choice between keeping silent and starting a screaming argument. So it’s a good idea to have some calm answers ready.

A complete list is impossible, I know, but these are two answers I have ready. Use the comments to add your own questions and answers.

If Warren Buffett thinks his taxes are too low, why can’t he just write a check to the Treasury?

Sometimes you need to answer a question with a question: What problem do you think that check would solve?

Background: Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett has often made the point that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. This seems wrong to him, and so his name has gotten attached to the so-called Buffett Rule.

So anyway, if the problem is just that Buffett feels guilty about his tiny (in a relative sense) tax bill, then presumably a voluntary contribution to the Treasury would make him feel better. But I haven’t seen any indication that Buffett feels guilty. He follows the rules. What’s to feel guilty about?

Buffett brings up his personal situation because he sees it as a symptom of a larger problem: In our tax system, the super-rich pay lower rates than many middle-class people. It’s a systemic injustice, not some personal injustice that Buffett does to his secretary or to the government.

So Buffett writing a check to the Treasury wouldn’t solve the problem. The Buffett Rule would.

Why do liberals want to punish job creators?

This question comes up whenever we talk about raising income tax rates on the wealthy back to what they were under President Clinton.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with punish. In general, taxes are not punishments. A state sales tax, for example, is not an attempt to punish people for buying things. Your local property tax is probably intended to fund public schools, not punish people for living somewhere. Ditto for the income tax.

Plus, it takes a real stretch of the imagination to look at the situation of rich people in the Clinton Era and describe it as punishment. Even at a Clintonesque tax rate, people will still want to be rich.

Next, consider want. Do liberals want to tax people? Not really. What we want is for our nation and our communities to have nice things — smooth roads, good schools, attractive parks, and so forth. We also want to put a safety net under people, so that lives aren’t ruined by the kinds of misfortunes that could happen to anyone. And we want every child, no matter whether they’re born to a wealthy family or a poor one, to have a legitimate chance to succeed.

If we could get all that out of a magic lamp, we would. But in non-magical reality, it takes money. That’s why we support taxes.

Next, why tax rich people at a higher rate than everybody else? Again, it’s not because we hate them or want to do them harm. Obviously, that’s where the real money is, and (if someone has to give up something) we’d rather see the rich go without a vacation home than see middle-class families decide not to send their kids to college or poor people scrimp on medicine or food.

But the deep reason is that it is fair for the rich to pay more. They are the people who are winning this game; the burden of keeping the game going should fall more to them.

Finally, job creators. In conservative rhetoric, every employer is a job creator, and it takes money to be an employer. “I never got a job from a poor person,” as the saying goes. So: more rich people with more money equals more jobs.

If only.

We could talk about the statistics, which show that as inequality increases, there is less job growth, but instead let’s run a thought experiment on a specific guy: John Schnatter, the founder and CEO of Papa John’s Pizza. Wikipedia claims that Papa John’s employs about 16,000 people. So, did Schnatter create those jobs?

Let me ask that a different way: What happens if Schnatter goes Galt? He folds his company, converts all his assets into gold, and disappears into some secret enclave in the Rockies. Does the economy really have 16,000 fewer jobs?

I don’t think so. I believe people who want pizzas just buy them somewhere else, and other pizza-makers expand to fulfill the demand. Probably they have to hire something like 16,000 more people. In short, I don’t think Schnatter creates any jobs. Demand for pizzas creates jobs. Schnatter is an easily replaced middleman.

The most successful entrepreneurs are those who destroy jobs. Putting aside the vulture-capitalism stories about Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, his big success story is Staples, a healthy business with around 50,000 employees. But before Staples, businesses got their office supplies from a variety of smaller shops and firms, most of which are gone now. Who employed more people — Staples or the companies it drove out of business? It would be tough to calculate the exact number, but I am confident the results would say that (when you net it all out) Staples destroyed jobs.

You know what really does create jobs? Infrastructure: highways, airports, reliable electricity. And nobody does infrastructure better than the government — if it can collect taxes.

December 17, 2012 – 11:11 am Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

Four Books to Ask Santa For

1. Wrong and Dangerous: ten right-wing myths about our constitution

by Garrett Epps

Tea Partiers have the same attitude towards the Constitution that Christian fundamentalists have towards the Bible: They speak of it with awe and reverence, but they interpret it according to their own inner sense of what it must be saying. In practice, they end up projecting their own desires onto the document.

Liberals usually answer populist nonsense with academic research, which is a bad political strategy. Again and again — global warming denial and “creation science” pop to mind — ridiculous ideas circulate (in the part of the population that doesn’t read Scientific American) without an effective answer from the experts in the field. We lack direct, everyday-language books and articles that take on know-nothing myths.

Epps’ book fills that hole for the Constitution. He provides easy-to-understand-and-remember labels for the kinds of fallacies  conservatives use when they “prove” their points about the Constitution, and then shows how ten conservative articles-of-faith about what the Constitution says are just flat wrong.

Myth 1, “the Right is originalist”, prepares the way for the rest. The myth is that only right-wingers care about the literal text of the Constitution or what the Founders meant when they wrote it, while liberals are just making law up as we go along. The problem is that right-wingers also believe they are the only ones who know what the Founders meant, and the result is that crazy right-wing theories about history become crazy right-wing theories about law.

From there, Epps takes on myths about states’ rights, international law, the Commerce clause, separation of church and state, and many others you will quickly recognize. My absolute favorite line comes out of his chapter on Myth 6: “The Second Amendment Allows Citizens to Threaten the Government”.

If good government actually came from a violent, armed population, then Somalia would be the best-governed place on earth.

2. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
by John Barry

If conservatives are going to make saints out of America’s founders, liberals need to learn about our own colonial heroes. Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island after escaping with his life from the Massachusetts Bay Colony theocracy, is a good candidate.

You know where the image of a “wall of separation between church and state” comes from? Not Jefferson, though he used it. In 1644, Williams wrote:

When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wildernes of the world, God hathe ever broke down the wall it selfe, removed the Candlestick, &c. and made his Garden a Wildernesse, as at this day.

Barry summarizes: “When one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics.”

3. Sacred Ground: pluralism, prejudice, and the promise of America
by Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and the author of Acts of Faith, a highly acclaimed memoir about finding his identity as both a Muslim and an American.

Patel is one of those people who got his name into the Big Rolodex at an early age. He could easily spend the next 30 years playing riffs on the same themes: interfaith cooperation, young people will grow past the prejudices of their elders, Muslims can be pluralists, and so on. I’m not going to name names, but it’s not hard to look around and see Big-Rolodex people who do just that. They have nice, pleasant careers giving talks at conferences, writing an occasional book saying the same things as their other books, and being a TV talking-head whenever their issues come up in the news.

That’s what makes Sacred Ground such a remarkable book. On the surface, it’s about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy and all the anti-Muslim bigotry that rose up around it. But it ends up revolving around an unexpected question Christiane Amanpour asks Patel on CNN. She beats him to the punch by quoting all the rising-religious-prejudice statistics he had been using on other shows, and then jumps to: “So what has all your work done?”

Patel dodges that question on the air — that’s his description — but later it gets under his skin: The promise of his Interfaith Youth Core was that young people of every faith would get experience working side-by-side with young people of every other faith on issues of common concern, and so develop mutual respect that would make religious bigotry a thing of the past in a single generation.

It’s not happening, is it?

So Patel has a business-consultant/friend look into why it isn’t happening, and the friend comes back with a blunt and unwelcome answer: The problem is you. You like running all over the world giving inspirational talks and presenting your Big Idea as the universal answer to every problem, but you haven’t bothered to figure out what those inspired people in your audience are supposed to do. Your organization reflects that; it does everything and nothing.

From there, Patel studies how a Big Idea becomes real change, and where IFYC needs to focus. And then the Ground Zero Mosque becomes a teaching moment for him: What kind of people did the community need and not have, who could have kept this issue from getting so out of hand? How could IFYC help make sure that such people will be there next time?

It doesn’t come to a sound-bite conclusion. Sacred Ground isn’t a finished book, but that’s because Patel himself is a work in progress. That’s what makes him fascinating.

4. Bet the Farm: how food stopped being food
by Frederick Kaufman

Bet the Farm is a vicarious journey: What if you started with a question that puzzled you, and had the kind of access that let you go wherever you needed to go and talk to whoever you needed to talk to?

Kaufman is a journalist who has been writing about the food system for decades. He starts with the question: “Why doesn’t everybody get the food they need?” and follows the answer wherever it goes. It takes him to the giant food marketers like Domino’s Pizza; to the giant enterprises that produce the components of pizza: tomato sauce, mozzarella, and pepperoni; to the data-crunchers who are trying to produce a measurable “sustainability index” for food production; to the engineers who are trying to produce better seeds for better crops; to the international technocrats putting together development strategies for the U. N.; to the grain futures market and the monied interests who profit from it.

Best observation: The market for food is the exact opposite of a “free” market, because every person in the world has to participate in it on penalty of death.

The overall message of the book is that hunger is a question not of food production or even economics, but of power. Power comes from profit, and profit comes from keeping prices low for the farmer and high for the eater. So that’s what our current food system is set up to do. Don’t be surprised when it succeeds.

December 17, 2012 – 10:30 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (2)

“Don’t politicize tragedy” is itself partisan rhetoric

Some lines in our political dialog sound non-partisan, but they only come up in a one-sided way. Once the media habit gets established, those unwritten usage rules are very hard to change.

For years now, liberals have been trying to turn judicial activism back against conservatives. But no matter how many Citizens United or Bush v Gore decisions right-wing judges write, judicial activism only has glue on its left side; it won’t stick to the Right.

We shouldn’t politicize this tragedy is similarly one-sided. It is only said in two situations:

  1. To stop liberals from talking about gun control after a mass shooting.
  2. To stop liberals from talking about worker safety after a mine disaster, factory fire, or some other big industrial accident.

It never limits conservatives, who routinely score political points in the wake of tragedy without even a sense of hypocrisy. The possibility that don’t politicize tragedy could apply to them just doesn’t register.

So Fox News’ Megyn Kelly can guiltlessly respond to the Newtown School shooting by asking a security expert:

I have two kids. Now I suddenly want to see an armed police officer in the school. I mean, I never even thought of that prior to now, but what would that take, to have an armed police officer in every school?

Kelly reaching for a more-guns solution is fine, but imagining fewer guns — as Bob Costas did two weeks before — politicizes tragedy.

In any other situation, major loss of life leads to action. The Patriot Act was signed six weeks after 9-11. I don’t recall anyone saying we shouldn’t politicize the tragedy. And as Chris Hayes observed Saturday,

If yesterday we had found out that the shooter’s name was Abdulmutallab and that he had been attending a mosque in Connecticut, everything about the response would be different.

One difference: No one would be shutting down the Islamophobes for politicizing the tragedy.*

The most predictably outrageous politicization of tragedy always comes from the Religious Right. Who can forget Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blaming 9-11 on

the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America

Falwell is dead, but his blame-the-secularists game continues. Thursday, when a Fox News anchor suggested to Mike Huckabee that people might ask “How could God let this happen?”, Huckabee responded by denouncing separation of church and state:

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability — that we’re not just going to have be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before, you know, a holy God in judgment. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.

So suggesting any limitation to Second Amendment rights politicizes the tragedy, but it’s fine for Huckabee to advocate against our First Amendment right to be free from an establishment of religion.

Huckabee was not alone. Bryan Fischer also started with “Where was God?”and went the same place with it:

Here’s the bottom line: God is not going to go where He’s not wanted. Now we have spent — since 1962, we’re 50 years into this now — we have spent 50 years telling God to get lost.

He then went through a litany First Amendment cases that limit Christian establishment before concluding:

We’ve kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us: “Hey, I’ll be glad to protect your children, but you’ve got to invite me back into your world first.”

I’m sure the Amish parents of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania wonder how exactly they banished God from their schoolhouse before five of their daughters were gunned down in 2006. But apparently Fischer’s God** is subject to the same rule as vampires: Even if He wants to help, He’s stuck on the threshold until somebody invites Him in.

In short, liberals: Don’t be cowed by people who tell you not to politicize a mass shooting or a mine cave-in. The don’t-politicize rule applies only to you. Whenever conservatives can spin a tragedy to their advantage, they will, and the self-appointed umpires who criticize you now will be completely silent.

*The same people who blame Islam for any crime by a guy with a Arab name — they twisted themselves into pretzels denying Christianity’s responsibility for Anders Breivik’s mass murder of liberal children in Norway (even though Breivik styled himself as a defender of Christendom). “No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder,” Bill O’Reilly declared.

If you would laugh at a Muslim who said that about believers in Allah, you should laugh at O’Reilly too.

**In some ways conservative Christians preachers are a special case, because their flocks do ask “Where was God?” and the ministers have no answer. The question points to a hole in their theology: If the Universe were governed by the God they describe (all-powerful, loving, good, and personally involved), these things would not happen. It’s that simple. It’s not a paradox or a mystery, it’s just a contradiction.

They can’t admit that, so they have to deflect blame onto someone else.

December 17, 2012 – 9:16 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Like the week, the Sift will be dominated by talk about guns and murders. Sorry if you’re already sick of it; that’s just what’s up. I promise not to rehash the details of this week’s two shootings or speculate on things that are still unknown about the shooters, like their motives and their general psychological conditions. There’s already way too much of that.

Instead, I’ll make a few one-step-back points about our overall reaction to gun violence and the unhealthy state of our political discourse. Most of that is the weekly summary (titled “Enough?”), but one point demanded to be a separate post: “Don’t politicize tragedy is itself partisan rhetoric.”

In addition, this week has two holiday-themed articles: “Books to Ask Santa For” and “Questions Your Conservative Cousin Might Ask”.

Unless some unexpected inspiration strikes and refuses to be aside, I’m taking Christmas Eve off. So (probably) no Sift next week. In two weeks, I’ll do my traditional Yearly Sift.

December 17, 2012 – 7:38 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment