What the Court Decided About Immigration

Last Monday, the Supreme Court struck down three of the four challenged sections of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070. As usual, the media covered the event as if it were nothing but a pivotal game in a partisan play-off series, and went back and forth on whether this was victory or defeat for the Obama administration.

Don’t be distracted or confused. If you read the decision, the outcome is pretty clear: It’s a victory for people who want to see immigrants (documented or undocumented) treated fairly. It’s a defeat for anybody who wants the police to hound Hispanics out of Arizona.

S. B. 1070 was passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Governor Jan Brewer in April, 2010. The Obama administration challenged the law in court before it could take effect, and a federal injunction has prevented Arizona from enforcing it until the case was settled.

Well, now it’s settled. Three of the four challenged provisions were struck down immediately:

  • Section 3 made it a state crime for a non-citizen to fail to carry documentation authorizing their presence in the country.
  • Section 5C made it a state crime for an undocumented alien to seek or accept employment.
  • Section 6 authorizes Arizona state police to arrest without a warrant any non-citizen who they have reason to believe has committed an offense that would make them deportable.

Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, with Chief Justice Roberts and three justices from the Court’s liberal wing (Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) concurring. Justice Kagan recused herself because she was in the Obama administration when the case was being prepared, and so might appear to have a conflict of interest. (Recusal decisions are up to the justices themselves. Liberal justices take these decisions seriously. Conservatives like Thomas and Scalia do not, even when money is involved.)

The reason Governor Brewer claimed victory and some liberals complained of defeat was that the Court did not strike down the fourth provision, 2B, which Justice Kennedy summarized like this:

Section 2(B) of S. B. 1070 requires state officers to make a “reasonable attempt . . . to determine the immigration status” of any person they stop, detain, or arrest on some other legitimate basis if “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.” Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §11–1051(B) (West 2012). The law also provides that “[a]ny person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status de­termined before the person is released.”

This section is why S.B. 1070 became known as the “papers please” law. It conjures up visions of police harassing anybody with brown skin or an accent, and locking them up until they can prove they’re in the country legally. (You always go swimming with your passport, don’t you?) Such behavior is certainly in line with the expressed purpose of the law, which is to pressure undocumented immigrants until they “self-deport”. And I’m projecting here, but I’d guess that many S.B. 1070 supporters will consider it a bonus if legal Hispanic immigrants leave the state too.

So why didn’t the Court strike 2B down? Justice Kennedy’s reasoning shouldn’t give any comfort to the people who want to harass Mexicans. It all hangs on the timing of the case and on that phrase “reasonable attempt”.

The administration sued before the law went into effect, before Arizona police came up with enforcement guidelines, and before the state courts had a chance to rule on whether those guidelines follow the state constitution. Kennedy doesn’t want to assume that those people won’t do their jobs properly.

At this stage, without the benefit of a definitive interpretation from the state courts, it would be inappropriate to assume §2(B) will be construed in a way that creates a conflict with federal law.

Justice Kennedy could imagine state courts toning 2B’s interpretation down to something like this: As long as we’re holding you for something else already, we might as well check with ICE to see if you’re in the country legally, and if not, see what they want us to do with you.

However, Kennedy also envisioned an interpretation where police would hold brown-skinned jaywalkers (rather than just ticketing them as usual) or extend the detention of other suspects while waiting for immigration information, which (since the rest of the ruling established that immigration is federal territory) is none of their business anyway. Kennedy left little doubt that this would be seen as an unreasonable attempt to determine a person’s immigration status.

So the Court didn’t endorse 2B, it just let Arizona off with a warning. If 2B comes back to the Court as a racial profiling case with actual victims, it will get struck down then.

If you doubt that reading of the Court’s decision, think about this: None of the liberal justices felt the need to write a dissenting opinion. That should tell you who won.

July 2, 2012 – 11:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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I Was Undocumented in Arizona

Real Americans carry ID

When I turned 50 a few years ago, I started doing something sort of paranoid: I always jog with my driver’s license and medical card, in case I have a heart attack. So far it’s never come in handy, but I keep doing it.

Paranoia has its costs, though. Almost two weeks ago, I was at Logan Airport in Boston when I flipped my wallet open and stared at an empty plastic window. My driver’s license was in a t-shirt pocket in my laundry hamper. I had no other photo ID.

My first thought was to change my flight and come back tomorrow, but that would mean missing a whole day of the conference I was going to – the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix – so I went with my second thought: See what happens.

I got a boarding pass from a machine that didn’t care what I looked like, then waited in line with everybody else and apologetically told my story to the TSA guy. He called over a supervisor, who looked at what I did have: two credit cards and prescription bottle. Making no promises about what would happen when I tried to come home, he let me through.

Eight days later, TSA in Phoenix was more thorough. They scoffed at my credit cards and pill bottle, as well as at my business card (which has a photo), and the ID the conference had given me. They asked about my health-insurance card, which of course was keeping my driver’s license company in the laundry hamper. They would have liked to have seen some mail with my address on it or maybe a utility bill, which I might have packed if I had known I was going to forget all my other ID.

So they called up a government database and started asking me questions about myself: my address and phone number, my wife’s maiden name, other towns I had lived in, and so on. Some of the stuff I didn’t know, like the names of the neighbors in my apartment building. Eventually they did an explosives-residue test on my hands, and then let me through.

At no time was I treated with anything other than respect. No one implied that I was a criminal or that I was trying to get away with something.

While I was undocumented, I learned two things of political significance:

First, those advocates of voter-ID laws who claim it’s no big deal because you already need a photo ID to do absolutely everything else in this society – they’re just wrong. A lot of people will ask for a photo ID, but if you don’t have one they work around it. For example, some places took my credit card without asking. When someone did ask, nobody batted an eye when I said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll pay cash” or called my wife over to charge it on her card. They may have had other work-arounds, but I didn’t ask.

TSA definitely will work with what you have, because they’re just trying to verify your identity, not stop you from traveling. On the other hand, when you try to vote in a Republican state, you run into a process that absolutely won’t work if you don’t have an official state-issued photo ID, and even a state-university ID isn’t good enough. That’s unusual, and you have to wonder if that’s because the purpose is to stop you from voting.

Second, it was ironic that I was on my way to Phoenix, and that one of the things I would do there was protest the Arizona immigration law, S.B. 1070, which is sometimes known as the papers-please law.

I wandered around Arizona for a week with no proof that I’m a US citizen other than my white skin, my Illinois accent, and a nice pair of khakis. Nobody cared. I never had to explain myself and I never had cause to be afraid.

Everybody who heard my license-in-the-hamper anecdote thought it was funny and wanted to know how I got through TSA. But if I’d been brown, poor, and speaking with a heavy Hispanic accent, the story might not have been so entertaining.

So I was undocumented in Arizona and nothing happened. No drama, no excitement.

That’s how white privilege usually shows up: Nothing happens. Think about that the next time you’re out in public and nothing is happening.

July 2, 2012 – 11:06 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The Supreme Court is kind of like a college student: It procrastinates, and then in the last few days of the term it comes out with an amazing barrage of papers.

This year, they even allowed themselves a temporary incomplete. The term was supposed to end last Monday, but they extended it to Thursday. Sure enough, that’s when they announced their most important decision, the one saying that ObamaCare is constitutional.

Usually, I focus the Sift on issues that I don’t think are getting enough attention, figuring that you already hear more than enough about whatever the media has fixated on. But sometimes the media over-coverage of the Issue of the Day is so confusing and full of spin that I feel like I need to straighten it out. So this week, two of the three articles are about the Court: one about the ObamaCare decision and one about the Arizona immigration decision.

The third article is my own story of accidentally traveling without ID: “I Was Undocumented in Arizona”. (Yes, you can get through TSA without a driver’s license or passport.) That will be the first story that shows up.

I’m also trying something different this week: I’m combining the weekly summary with the Nuggets or Short Notes. I still haven’t decided whether I like the idea or not, but we’ll see how it goes.

July 2, 2012 – 7:53 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Making the Day

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. THE WEEKLY SIFT RETURNS JULY 1.

There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now OK to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.

– Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin senate candidate, on being gay in politics

In this week’s sift:

  • Nuggets of the Week. Greece, Jamie Dimon, disrespecting the president, saying “vagina” in Michigan, the end of judicial restraint, an example of American exceptionalism, and President Bush’s head on a pike.
  • If not ObamaCare, what? Either through the courts or the ballot box, Republicans mean to get rid of ObamaCare. But Mitt Romney’s plans to replace it are surprisingly thin, and the vague plans he has only look good if you’re an insurance company.
  • What senate candidates deserve your support? You can only vote for candidates in your state, but you can volunteer and give money to anybody you like. Which campaigns are the best investment of your time or money?
June 18, 2012 – 2:25 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Nuggets of the Week

Everybody was talking about …

Whether the Greek elections will lead to the end of the euro. But the conservatives won, so a lot of Chicken Littling went to waste. Background here. Krugman’s take here. Most insightful conversation I heard here:

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Jamie Dimon’s “grilling” by the Senate Banking Committee, where all the senators other than Merkley and Menendez fawned over a bankster who learned nothing from the financial collapse other than how to do it again. As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote:

This was an opportunity to show Americans how a too-big-to-fail commercial bank like Chase – supported by vast amounts of public treasure, from Fed loans to bailouts to less obvious subsidies like GSE purchases of mortgages and implicit guarantees of bank debt – uses the crutch of government support to gamble recklessly in search of huge profits, with the public on the hook for any potential downside.

That opportunity was missed. Only Jon Stewart fully captured the absurdity.

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Why they call the genre “fantasy”

Disrespecting the president. Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro wouldn’t let President Obama make an uninterrupted announcement Friday in the Rose Garden. Like Congressman Joe Wilson shouting “You lie!” during a presidential speech to Congress, this is an example of President Obama getting less respect from the Right than President Bush got from the Left. (Well, there was the shoe-throwing incident, but that was an Iraqi reporter in Baghdad, not a member of the White House press corps. That guy went to prison for nine months and came out missing a tooth. And W’s head briefly appeared on a pike in Game of Thrones, but I regard being just two pikes down from Ned Stark’s head more as an honor than an insult.)

Gawker’s Emma Carmichael commented:

Press conferences have a very simple etiquette that is only heightened when the speaker in question is the leader of the free world. You listen to someone speak, you roll your eyes in the back row, you check your email and play Tetris on your smart phone, and as soon as the speaking is over someone says “time for questions,” and you raise your hand and ask a question that will lead directly into your column the next day.

What you can’t say in the Michigan legislature. The Michigan legislature is considering a bill that would severely restrict abortion. (The House passed the first part of it Wednesday.) Democratic Rep. Lisa Brown from West Bloomfield spoke briefly against the bill, making two main points: The regulations in the bill would cause clinics to close and people to lose their jobs; and not allowing abortions to save the life of the mother would force Jews to violate Jewish law. She closed by saying:

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but “no” means “no”.

That got her banned from speaking on the floor of the House.

… but this also was worth your attention

Judicial restraint was a useful concept for conservatives when the Supreme Court was liberal. But now that the Court is conservative, George Will wants to “unleash” it.

Conservatives, however, cannot coherently make the case for Romney as a shaper of the judicial branch until they wean themselves, and perhaps him, from excessive respect for judicial “restraint” and condemnation of “activism.”

The journal Democracy held a round table on “Politics in 2024“. This deserves more than a line, which maybe I’ll give it in a future Sift.

American exceptionalism? Here’s an example:

June 18, 2012 – 1:49 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

If Not ObamaCare, What?

One way or another — either by decree of an activist Supreme Court or by winning in November and repealing the Affordable Care Act — Republicans are aiming for a post-ObamaCare world. What would they do then?

Despite the rhetoric against it, ObamaCare has never been just an extension of federal power for its own sake. It is an attempt to solve a serious problem: When President Obama took office, something like 50 million Americans did not have health insurance. Millions more had hollow health insurance: Their most likely health problems were labeled “pre-existing conditions” and not covered. Also, yearly or lifetime caps on what the insurance company had to spend meant that people were only covered if they didn’t get too sick. In short, millions of Americans with some kind of insurance still faced bankruptcy if they had major health problems.

The ACA is not a perfect solution. Some people will still fall through its cracks, but ObamaCare imposes federal standards that do away with hollow insurance, and (when it fully takes effect in 2014) it will considerably shrink the pool of uninsured Americans.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the best we could do, or whether the same or better results might have been achieved more efficiently with either more or less government intervention. But reasonable people can’t argue with this: If ObamaCare gets repealed, we’ll then face the same serious health-care problem that President Obama faced when he took office.

What would President Romney do about it?

The Romney campaign web site has a page about that. At first glance, it looks like a serious plan: It has 15 bullet points, each of which looks like a link to some detailed position paper. However, they aren’t links; they’re just bullet points formatted in blue.

That’s all you get.

Blanks, not bullets. A few of the 15 are standard conservative talking points that sound good but are basically empty, like capping malpractice awards. (I’ve explained before why I think this will accomplish very little. Short version: Malpractice awards themselves are a trivial part of the overall healthcare budget, and claims about “defensive medicine” don’t hold up when put to the test. States that cap malpractice awards don’t suddenly see their healthcare costs drop.)

Another empty bullet: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” Good as that sounds, it just restates what the HIPA Act established in 1996. People who spend their 20s in some Starbucks-barista type job could still be out in the cold when they finally do try to get insurance later on.

And yes, it would be nice to have “IT interoperability”, “non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution”, and “Consumer Reports-type ratings of alternative insurance plans”, but none of that is going to help you much if you get cancer. And actually guaranteeing such stuff would be too much government intervention anyway, so Romney just pledges to “encourage” and “facilitate” these changes.

States and individuals lose power to corporations. Romney’s website highlights this quote:

I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.

And yes, the substantive parts of the Romney plan do appear to move responsibility and decision-making from the federal government to states and individuals. However, when you assemble the bigger picture the bullet-points paint, the real story is that power moves to the insurance companies.

Here’s how: The federal government gets out of the standards-making business, apparently returning that power to the states. However, the bullet “Allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines” undoes all that state power. If consumers can purchase insurance in any state, then states can’t regulate the health insurance sold to their citizens. If Vermont has high consumer-protection standards and New Hampshire low ones, then health insurance companies will only offer Vermonters policies written in New Hampshire.

You could argue that the market will provide whatever consumers demand, but we’ve seen this scenario play out before, when interstate banking was deregulated in 1999. If you have a Citicorp credit card, you send your payments to South Dakota. Bank of America payments go to Texas. That’s because those states have low consumer-protection standards. Would you like to have a Visa protected by the more consumer-friendly laws of, say, Massachusetts? Good luck with that; you won’t find one.

The same thing happened 100 years ago with corporate charters. Half of all U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, because Delaware won the race to the bottom.

So we know pretty well what will happen to health insurance if there are no federal standards and insurance companies can sell across state lines: States will race to the bottom until a few states say that health-insurance companies can do whatever they want. Then all policies will be written in those states. There won’t be anything you can do about it, because nobody you can vote for will have any control.

Block grants. Romney’s first bullet reads “Block grant Medicaid and other payments to states”. The cost of Medicaid is currently shared between the states and the federal government. (This article says the feds pay 60% in Texas.) For its contribution, the federal government gets to establish standards.

A block-grant approach would have the federal government say, “Here’s some money for Medicaid; spend it however you want.” By writing that check, the federal government would completely discharge its responsibility for providing health care to poor people.

The assumption behind this approach is that federal standards are inefficient. Left to its own devices, a state might get more out of the money than it does with the feds looking its shoulder. That may or may not be true, and it can work in either a conservative or a liberal direction. (Vermont is hoping for some kind of no-strings arrangement as it moves towards a single-payer system.)

But something else happens when you move the federal government out of the picture: You break the link between poor people’s health care and the Federal Reserve.

As we have seen since 2007, the federal government can borrow money in large quantities even during a financial crisis. And since dollars are created by the Federal Reserve, it is literally impossible for the federal government to go bankrupt as long as it owes dollars.

But states can go bankrupt, and the threat of bankruptcy can force them to do otherwise unthinkable things. Since 2007, states have been canceling projects and laying people off in droves — not because they wanted to destroy jobs and not because they suddenly discovered they didn’t really need teachers or firefighters or highways. But tax receipts were down, needs were up, and something had to give.

If there were no federal standards and federal money involved, Medicaid would be the obvious place to cut during a  crisis. (Texas keeps looking at abandoning the Medicaid system anyway,  even if it means losing the federal money.) Sure, some people would die, but they’re poor and don’t have press agents, so who would notice? (When did you last see a headline like “Sick homeless man dies in alley”? Do you think it never happens?) And if the poor decided to move to a more compassionate state, so much the better. Win/win.

In short, a state Medicaid program can’t provide the same security as the current system. States can promise whatever they want, but in a crisis those benefits would vanish.

And even in good times, states would feel pressure to race to the bottom. Be hard on poor people and maybe they’ll go somewhere else.

Responsibility. Everybody looks with horror at the upward-sloping trend in healthcare spending. But there are two ways to deal that trend: Figure out how to deliver care to everyone more efficiently, as most European countries do. Or push the responsibility off on somebody else, with the ultimate result that federal government won’t be held responsible when there’s no money to take care of people.

Romney wants to go in the second direction. Under President Romney, we could expect more and more people to have hollow insurance policies (written in whichever state allows the hollowest insurance). More and more people will either go bankrupt when they get sick, or will depend on state programs that go unfunded in hard times.

Stacked up against that future, ObamaCare looks pretty good.

June 18, 2012 – 12:36 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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What Senate Candidates Deserve Your Support?

Last week a Sift-reading friend told me she had set aside some money to contribute to Senate candidates, and wondered where I thought it would be best spent.

We agreed that this is a good time to contribute. In general, early money is more valuable than late money, but (if you’re like me) you’d usually rather see your money spent in the general election than during the primary. So one of best times to contribute is right after the primaries bring the race down to a Democrat vs a Republican.

There are 33 Senate races this year, but a few simple criteria will narrow down the candidates worth contributing to or volunteering for.

I’ve never claimed to be non-partisan. (I try hard to keep the Sift honest, but I’m not trying to be neutral. I write what I believe, not just what I want you to believe.) So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my first criterion is that I’m only considering candidates who will caucus with the Democrats. (That would include independents like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Angus King of Maine.) Anybody committed to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader is off my list.

Second, the race should be close. I love Bernie Sanders, but I expect him to win with or without me. Real Clear Politics currently rates 8 races as toss-ups: Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Whether that’s your serious-support list or not depends on how optimistic/pessimistic you are about what will happen between now and November. If you expect a big Democratic surge that isn’t showing up in the polls yet, then you might want to reach for one of RCP’s “leans Republican” seats, like Arizona, where Richard Carmona currently trails by about 11%. If you expect the opposite, you might want to defend one of the “leans Democratic” candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, ahead by 8%.

I don’t really have a hunch about the trend, so I’ll stick with the toss-ups. Next, I want strong progressive voices in the Senate. I want somebody who’s going to make me proud, not just be slightly better than a Republican. That takes Bill Nelson of Florida (not to be confused with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is worse) off my list. He has a history of joining Republicans on issues like eliminating the estate tax, and he’s generally one of the last Democrats to get on board for things like raising the debt ceiling. So, Bill, I’ll be rooting for you on election night, but I can think of people more deserving of my time and money.

Elizabeth Warren

Two candidates that jump right out at me are Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Both of them will face an avalanche of out-of-state money, Warren from the financial industry and Baldwin from the religious right.

Elizabeth Warren. Warren you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Massachusetts. I first noticed her when she was chair of the Senate’s TARP Oversight Committee. She did several very plain-spoken, hard-hitting interviews on Rachel Maddow’s show where she laid out exactly how opaque the program was and how few of the underlying problems were being fixed.

The best argument for putting Warren in the Senate was the Jamie Dimon testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. (More about that in the Nuggets.) Warren is exactly the person who should have been in that room.

She’s a Harvard law professor, so her opponent Sen. Scott Brown is trying to tar her with the Harvard elitist label. But she wasn’t born into the Harvard strata of society, she started in the working class and climbed the ladder. She understands ordinary people and wants to be in a position to watch their backs.

Current polls are about as close as polls can be: Brown 43.8%, Warren 43.5%. I expect Warren to win a close race for three reasons: Undecideds have a tendency to break against the incumbent, Massachusetts is a blue state, and Warren’s supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about her. But Wall Street really hates Warren, so Brown will have a lot of money to spend.

Tammy Baldwin. Unless you live in Wisconsin, you may not know much about Tammy Baldwin. She’s been in Congress for 14 years, and is the only openly lesbian congresswoman. (She was already out of the closet when she ran in 1998. Up until that time, the only gay representatives had come out while in office.) In 2010, National Journal’s ratings had her tied for being the most liberal member of the House.

Now, my first thought on hearing those facts would be: She’s going to get crushed. But so far that’s not happening. The Republican primary isn’t until August, and the RCP average has her trailing former Governor Tommy Thompson by 8.7%. But that average is skewed by a Rasmussen poll with a huge Republican bias (Thompson ahead 52%-36%).  The other two polls have her behind Thompson by manageable numbers: 4% and 6%, which could just be name recognition. Marquette University’s poll has her ahead of the other two likely Republican candidates.

There’s also no guarantee Thompson wins the primary, or gets through unscathed with the Club for Growth gunning for him. Chuck Todd sums up the race and interviews Baldwin:

Other toss-up Democrats. Claire McCaskill isn’t exactly an inspiring progressive voice. (National Journal rates her exactly in the middle as the 50th most liberal senator.) But this is Missouri we’re talking about; what did you expect? I think she’s doing as much as the voters will allow, and that holding this seat is key to holding the Senate. Polls: Rasmussen has her behind by double digits, but PPP says the race is tied.

Jon Tester in Montana is another incumbent Democrat in a Republican state. Don’t expect his support on, say, gun control. But his heart is in the right place when it comes to keeping Wall Street in check. PPP and Rasmussen disagree about who is ahead.

Immigration is likely to be a huge issue in the Nevada race. Shelley Berkley is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, who was appointed when John Ensign resigned in disgrace. Nevada is a swing state that’s been trending blue as the Hispanic vote increases, but Republicans keep offering far-right candidates. Heller is a typical senate Republican, rated the 73rd most liberal senator. Berkley supports the DREAM Act; Heller wants to build a bigger border fence. The non-Rasmussen polls have this as a neck-and-neck race.

In Virginia, Tim Kaine vs. George Allen is a marquee match-up. Kaine has been governor and Allen senator. (Allen famously lost to Jim Webb in 2006 after the Macaca gaffe.) So far, I haven’t found anything thrilling on Kaine’s web site, and he seems to be running a vague I-was-a-good-governor campaign. But he’s narrowly ahead in the swingiest of swing states.

I confess I had never heard of North Dakota candidate Heidi Heitkamp until this morning. She’s running in a red state as a former state attorney general who fights for the people. Her web site is focused on local North Dakota issues, and I really have no idea how progressive she’d be. (She favors the Keystone Pipeline that environmentalists oppose.) Polls have her neck-and-neck with Rep. Rick Berg.

June 18, 2012 – 10:53 am Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

OK, it’s Monday. I’m awake. The week’s articles should start appearing in 2 or 3 hours.

What was everybody was talking about this week? Greece, the Senate Banking Committee’s love-fest with bankster Jamie Dimon, the reporter who heckled the president in the Rose Garden, and the female representative who got punished for assaulting the virgin ears of the Michigan legislature by saying “vagina”. But I bookmarked a lot of other interesting stuff for this week’s Nuggets and I still haven’t decided how much of it I have space for.

In addition to the Nuggets, this week’s Sift will have two longer articles:

  • If not ObamaCare, what? Even if the Affordable Care Act survives its upcoming death match with the Supreme Court, Mitt Romney has pledged to repeal it. But his plans for replacing it are surprisingly thin. The vague principles he does endorse sound great — especially if you’re an insurance company.
  • What Senate candidates should you support? This comes from a Sift-reader’s question: Everybody’s talking about Obama vs. Romney, but the Senate is also up for grabs in November. If you have money to contribute or time to volunteer (and you don’t just want to focus on your local race), where should it go? I answer this question with two other questions: Did you know that the most liberal member of the House is running to become the first openly lesbian senator? And that her race is rated a toss-up?

And by the way: No Sift next Monday, because this week I’ll be at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix. They tell me that our plans for protesting the Arizona anti-immigrant law do not include getting arrested, but I haven’t seen Sheriff Arpaio’s plans. And while I understand that some great writing has been done in jail, I’ll bet the wifi signal is terrible, so I’m not going to stress over getting a blog out. The Sift will return July 1.

June 18, 2012 – 7:37 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Ch-ch-changes

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

–  Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1977)

Changes in the Weekly Sift. It’s been almost a year since I re-formatted the Weekly Sift and moved it to weeklysift.com. I think it’s time for some changes again.

In August and September, three posts went viral, totaling over 100K of the 162K views the Sift has had all year. I think it spoiled me. Since then I’ve been searching a little too hard for the next viral post, and I think I need to shift back towards the Sift’s original mission: offering my readers a trustworthy condensation of the public debate, and saving them time by sifting through the info-stream and fetching out the occasional nugget.

The changes will be subtle. I’m still going to write my own articles when I can’t find anything that makes exactly the right point, but I’m going to refocus my efforts on serving my regular readers rather than seeking the attention of 10,000 strangers.

The obvious changes are that Short Notes has been renamed Nuggets of the Week, re-organized, and moved to the top of the blog. I’ve also added a Monday Morning Teaser to preview the day’s articles for those who come early. And when I don’t have changes to explain, the weekly summary will be shorter than it used to be.

In this week’s sift:

  • Nuggets of the Week. Everybody was talking about the Wisconsin recall, Ray Bradbury, and the transit of Venus, but other stuff was also worth your attention: what an oil pipeline break looks like, an anti-rape video from Scotland, the commencement speech you should have heard, how crazy Americans look to Germans, articles based on Chris Hayes’ and Joseph Stiglitz’s new books, the Netroots Nation videos, a fabulous photo from Milky Way Scientists, and more.
  • What Happened in Wisconsin? After all that, Scott Walker stays in office. How bad were the results? Should Obama be worried about carrying Wisconsin? Should we all be worried about the unprecedented money Walker raised and spent? And can you really buy an election with that much money? How?
  • Demonizing the Girl Scouts. It looks like the Catholic Church is joining right-wing Protestants in villainizing the Girl Scouts. Partly it’s the whole female-empowerment thing. But it’s also part of a larger pattern. Increasingly the Religious Right sees the American melting pot as a caldron of contamination.
June 11, 2012 – 1:37 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Nuggets of the Week

Everybody was talking about …

The Wisconsin recall election, of course, but I’ve already written about that today.

Remembering Ray Bradbury. In 2012, we take for granted that you can find really good writing in genre fiction. Salman Rushdie writes childrens’ books, SciFi has Neal Stephenson, fantasy China Mieville, and so on.

Thank Ray Bradbury for that. Most pre-Bradbury scifi writers didn’t mess with sissy techniques like metaphor, while “serious” authors stayed far away from time travel or outer space. Ray started breaking down that wall, and the rest is history.

Obits were everywhere. The NYT’s was as good as anybody’s.

The transit of Venus. Venus passed between the Earth and the Sun Tuesday, making a black dot on the Sun if you had the right eyewear. Don’t worry if you missed it; you can catch it again in 2117.

Time-lapse photo of actual transit

A transit-of-Venus pizza

… but a lot of other stuff was also worth your attention:

Here’s what it looks like when an oil pipeline breaks. This one is in Alberta and was discovered Thursday night.

A popular right-wing meme is “How can we expect the government to do X when it can’t even run the Post Office?” AlterNet explains why the Post Office would be doing fine if not for “phantom accounting”.

Nate Silver presented his state-by-state prediction model for the presidential election. Current prediction: Obama wins 291.8 electoral votes to Romney’s 246.2. (Decimals appear because Nate weights his averages by the confidence of his prediction. So his 63.4% confidence that Obama wins Virginia’s 13 electoral votes adds 8.2 EVs to Obama’s column and 4.8 to Romney’s.) He followed up with a summary of how different organizations’ electoral forecasts disagree.

This anti-rape video from Scotland is both clever and effective.

Secret space plane? How cool is that? Next they’re going to tell us that Hal Jordan has test-flown it.

If you didn’t like the commencement speech at your graduation, why not overwrite that memory with a better one? Here’s the speech Atul Gawande gave at Williams. Atlantic links you to video of speeches by Neil Gaiman, Jane Lynch, President Obama, Steve Carell, Aaron Sorkin, and Fareed Zakaria.

After the LinkedIn password disaster, you may be looking to create new passwords that are easy to remember and hard to crack. Salon’s Farhad Manjoo explains a good technique, though he is misinformed about how recent it is.

Two articles that capture how different things look in Germany: Der Spiegel explains how crazy our American fear of national health care looks to Germans. Yes! magazine describes Germany’s plan to invest $270 billion in replacing all of its nuclear power with renewable energy.

To see how Germany views labor unions and public property, check out Thomas Geoghagan’s Were You Born on the Wrong Continent, which I reviewed in September, 2010.

Looking for transit-of-Venus photos led me to the Facebook page of Milky Way Scientists, who have a great photo collection.

The Nation gives Chris Hayes space to preview the argument of his new book The Twilight of the Elites. I think I’m going to have to read this.

Summary: A genuine meritocracy would have a lot of inequality (as talented people move to the top), but also a lot of mobility (as talented children rise from the lower classes). But what would happen after the elites gained enough power to keep inequality while shutting down mobility?

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members; it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward; and it would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking and self-dealing, as those on top pursued the outsized rewards promised for superstars.

Sound familiar?

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is also thinking about the elite in his Vanity Fair article, also based on a recent book:

Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position.

Like me, you probably didn’t make to Providence for the Netroots Nation conference. Wasn’t it good of them to put so many of the videos online?

Steve Almond raised an interesting question in the NYT’s Sunday magazine: What if liberals doggedly pursued our own agenda, and stopped letting clowns like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin distract us?

This is something I wrestle with in the Sift: When do you need to know what the other side is saying, and when does a story just titillate your rage to no constructive purpose? (Comments welcome. Feel free to take today’s Girls Scouts article as an example.)

June 11, 2012 – 12:37 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)