Made For You and Me

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
Sign was painted, it said “Private Property.”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

— Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land“ (1940)

In this week’s Sift:

The Sift Bookshelf: Winner-Take-All Politics

Very suddenly over the last month, the liberal side of the blogosphere has started buzzing about the concentration of wealth and income, and how the United States has become much more stratified over the last few decades.

Of course this is nothing new: You’ve been seeing articles about the disappearing middle class for many years. (The Barlett and Steele best-seller America: What Went Wrong? was on the story in 1992, and the libertarian magazine Reason felt it necessary to deny the trend in 2007.) Lots of us have been talking about this for a long time, but recently we’ve all been talking about it at the same time. Why?

I think it’s due to two new popularizations: the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson which came out September 14, and Timothy Noah’s 10-part series The Great Divergence on Slate, published September 3-14. Both draw from research published over the last five years by two French economists: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

Winner-Take-All-Politics is a marvelous connect-the-dots book. It makes not just one point, but a series of points that fit together like train-cars.

Inequality is really happening, but not how you think. This is the part that relies on Saez and Piketty, who looked at U.S. tax data to paint a finer-grained portrait of inequality than we used to get from census data. The old statistics typically cut the country up into five 20% chunks (quintiles) or ten 10% chunks (deciles). If you do that, you can see the top quintile or decile pulling away from the rest, but it doesn’t look too bad.

Saez and Piketty showed that something much more strange and scary is going on: The real action isn’t in the center of the economy, it’s on the extreme where the very rich live. What the rest of us are experiencing is just the trailing edge of a wave that starts there.

Within the top decile, the top 1% is pulling away even faster from the other 9%. Within the top 1%, the top .1% is pulling away faster yet, and so on. If the United States were 1000 people, the richest guy would have made 2% of the money in 1973. By 2008 his share was up to 8%. (Factoring in capital gains, it goes from 2.7% to 12.3%. In a village of 1000 people, one guy makes nearly 1/8 of the money.)

And that screws up a lot of the benign explanations. Yes, globalization and immigration force our unskilled workers to compete with the unskilled workers of the world. Yes, automation is replacing factory workers with machines. Yes, women and minorities are competing in labor markets that used to belong to white men. Yes, the educated fare better in the modern world than the uneducated. But that can’t explain why the effect is most pronounced at the wealthy extreme, why we increasingly have a winner-take-all economy. None of those factors apply to the moderately rich, or explain why they can’t keep up with the super-rich.

It’s the government, stupid. We usually picture the economy as a natural phenomenon, and see government coming in after-the-fact to “redistribute” income. The recent decades’ changes in government “redistribution” — mainly tax and benefit cuts — clearly benefit the rich, but aren’t enough to account for the changes, so we think government is off the hook and look for larger forces like globalization.

In fact, government shapes the “free” market at every level: what can be owned or sold (your patented idea is a marketable asset, your liver isn’t), who has a seat at the negotiating table (unions are represented on corporate boards in Germany, and boards have much more control over CEOs), who absorbs risk (that’s what the bailouts represent: private interests transferring their risks to the public), what costs are externalized (pollution), and so on.

In the United States (and not nearly so much in Europe) government policy since about 1978 has consistently shaped the economy towards a winner-take-all structure. As a result, the U.S. used to be more egalitarian than Europe, and now is much less so. And that’s not because Europe exists in a different global economy.

What about democracy? Hacker and Pierson take seriously the paradox of an elected government systematically favoring the few over the many, even when Democrats have been in power. How is that possible?

The short answer is that when a complex bureaucracy governs a complex economy, organization matters more than numbers. The rich and their corporations have gotten much more organized in the last generation, while organizations that focused workers’ power (i.e., unions) have declined. Both of these patterns are embedded in vicious cycles: the government can make it harder or easier for various interest groups to organize.

The organized few beating the disorganized many explains how polls can say that 60% favor a public option in health care, but the public option doesn’t even come up for a vote in the Senate. A clear majority favors letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy, and it makes no sense to extend them, but even some Democrats are ready to.

Even when good laws get passed, enforcement depends on a million little things happening correctly, and the organized power of wealth is there to see that they don’t happen. Loopholes get written into regulation. Regulators get appointed who don’t want to enforce the law. Penalties get set at levels so low that violators just consider them a normal cost of doing business, and so on.

Organization also shapes the outcome by misdirection: Exxon never gets confused about where its interests lie in the global warming debate, but ordinary people do.

Hacker/Pierson trace this trend to the Carter administration, when huge post-Watergate Democratic majorities were unable to make any progress on a liberal agenda. The initial conditions that get the vicious cycle started are: a decline in union membership, television increases the role of money in campaigns, and the wealthy started pooling their money to create a wide-ranging infrastructure. (In the old days, GM would lobby against car safety regulations and Standard Oil would try to hang onto special tax treatment for oil wells, but neither would do much to influence a Supreme Court nomination. Now, corporate and billionaire money supports a broad conservative movement through institutions like the Heritage Foundation or the Club for Growth.)

America in a parallel universe. I don’t really have the space to do the Hacker/Pierson case justice, so instead I’ll illustrate in my own way how relatively subtle changes in the economic/political cycle can have huge impacts over time. Let’s look at how early America could have developed differently.

America was founded not just on freedom and democracy, but also on high wages. In colonial times, the nearby western frontier worked like a minimum-wage law. If you paid people too badly, they’d go clear their own land instead of working for you.

As the frontier moved further west, the causality started working in the other direction, creating a virtuous cycle: High wages in the East allowed workers to raise the capital they needed to go west and homestead — enough for a horse, a wagon, some tools, and the wherewithal to keep a family going until a crop came in. In Democracy in America (1835) de Touqueville described it like this:

The European emigrant always lands, therefore, in a country which is but half full, and where hands are in request; he becomes a workman in easy circumstances, his son goes to seek his fortune in unpeopled regions, and he becomes  a rich landowner. The former amasses the capital which the latter invests.

So the West was like college. You came to America and saved so that you could send your children there.

Whatever actually happened always looks inevitable. But it didn’t have to work that way. If the rich in the East could have beaten down wages for just a decade or two, they could have stopped this egalitarian cycle. Then the poor would be trapped working for them for subsistence wages, and never raise the capital to go west.

Picture how it plays out from there: As the western expansion fizzles, the wealthy make the case to Congress that the policy of selling public land cheaply in small parcels (going back to the Land Ordinance of 1785) has failed. The way to settle the continent, they claim, is in vast Spanish-style haciendas.

But America’s frontier isn’t the open country of Mexico. So how can the rich clear the forests of Ohio and turn them into tillable land? The same way they drained the swamps of Georgia and South Carolina and established plantations there: with slaves. The case might sound a lot like the one made by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in 1787: “the nature of our climate, and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes … without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste.” [“desert” meant “deserted” in those days, not dry.]

So the first new states get settled like this: A plantation-owning family from Virginia purchases a 10,000-acre plot from the government and sends out a younger son with a slave workforce to clear it. Any law that might stop him is standing in the way of the nation’s progress, and needs to be repealed.

And this, of course, keeps the low-wage cycle going. If you want a job on the frontier, you’ll have to do it cheaper than a slave. Even in Ohio, a worker can’t raise the capital to move on and settle Illinois or Wisconsin. So the rich will have to manage that expansion too.

When coal is discovered in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, that also becomes a job that white (i.e. free) men won’t do — at least they won’t do it for wages that compete with slaves. That becomes common sense, just like our idea today that only Mexicans will pick lettuce.

And America becomes a very different place.

You see, an egalitarian society is a fragile thing. If power and wealth ever get too concentrated — even accidentally, even just for a little while — then the powerful can capture enough of the government, media, and intelligensia to make their vision of the future seem like common sense. Even if you theoretically have the votes to defeat them, you can’t, because any alternative vision seems too utopian to fight for.

If you want to see how the far Right responds to these ideas, look here. The vanishing middle class is Socialism’s fault. The fact that it’s not happening nearly as badly in countries that are more socialist than we are just doesn’t come up.

Anti-Crazy is not a Winning Political Platform

Now the primaries are complete: Christine O’Donnell of Delaware has joined Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, and Joe Miller in Alaska in a bloc of seven Republican/Tea Party Senate candidates.

Of that group, O’Donnell is both the newest and the most unlikely: Not only does she have no government experience, she barely has a resume at all. She founded the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth (SALT, as in “salt of the Earth”), a group that encouraged young people to live lives of Christian purity, particularly in regard to sex. (By now probably everyone has seen her denunciation of masturbation on MTV.) And she worked for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a conservative non-profit focused on college students) until that job ended in a gender discrimination lawsuit in 2005. Since then she has been running for the Senate and supporting herself by doing “odd jobs” — or maybe by illegally spending campaign funds for living expenses.

Democrats have treated O’Donnell’s victory over popular Congressman Mike Castle like an early Christmas present. Castle was a shoo-in to move Joe Biden’s old seat into the Republican column, but O’Donnell trails Democrat Chris Coons by double digits. Castle is refusing to endorse O’Donnell — maybe her campaign’s suggestion that he’s gay ticked him off — so the prospects for Republican unity are dim.

Still, I’m worried that the campaign against O’Donnell is off to a bad start. Despite their pro-rich, anti-working-class agenda, conservatives appeal to the working class by casting liberals as over-educated elitists who look down on people like you. So carelessly heaping scorn on O’Donnell just makes her the someone-like-you that liberals look down on.

In particular, problems in a candidate’s past only work if they are substantiated in the present. Here’s what I said about Obama/McCain in June, 2008:

Experience works as an issue only until the public can see the candidates side-by-side. At that point, the experience difference has to be visible in their performance — McCain needs to look like he knows what he’s talking about while Obama doesn’t. If the experience advantage is invisible — and I think it will be — the issue goes away.

Well, crazy works the same way. If O’Donnell on the campaign trail looks no more threatening than a young Sally Field, it won’t matter how many nutty things she’s said in the past. But if Democrats can make an issue of the nutty things she’s advocating now, then her past becomes significant again.

With that in mind, I think Rachel Maddow was on the right track Thursday when she called attention to the truly radical anti-abortion positions of the Tea Party candidates:

There are now at least five Republican Senate nominees — five — who not only think that the government should outlaw abortion nationwide, they think there should be no exceptions made for anybody who’s the victim of incest or is the victim of rape. … What these Republican candidates are talking about is not only the federal government monitoring every pregnancy in the country to make sure that it ends the way the government prefers, which is a live birth, but they’re also saying that the government should force rape victims –– the government should force rape victims, under pain of criminal prosecution — to give birth to their rapist’s baby.

In the world Sharon Angle, Cristine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, and Rand Paul want to create, rape is a viable evolutionary strategy for men. We can put a rapist’s body in jail, but his genes will live on.

Similarly off-the-wall Republican positions are that to return all unspent stimulus money. In other words: All those half-done road repairs should be left the way they are. Rand Paul’s view that private business should be allowed to practice racial discrimination — that’s something he believes now, not some foolish idea from his benighted youth. And in the Senate, he’d have a vote on nominees for the Supreme Court.

And finally, the attack on health-care reform needs to be met head-on. Fifty million people now lack health insurance, and many of the rest of us are one lay-off away from joining them. The law that Democrats passed will cut that number in half, and give Americans security where Republicans offer them only risk. Repealing health-care reform with no plan for covering those 50 million is a truly wacky idea, and it needs to be called out as such.

If you follow the Rachel Maddow link, you’ll see one thing that I think she gets wrong. She quotes Sharon Angle responding to the no-exception-for-rape abortion question :

I’m a Christian, and I believe that god has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives, and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations. We need to have a little faith in many things.

Rachel comments: “I don’t know what you’re supposed to have faith in” and makes a couple of guesses that miss the point. But anybody who speaks Fundamentalist knows immediately what Angle meant: You wouldn’t have gotten pregnant if God didn’t have a plan for your rapist’s baby.

Let’s be sure to call her crazy for the right reasons, and not because we don’t understand what she’s saying.

Restore Sanity With Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart is rallying in Washington to restore sanity. It’s on: Saturday, October 30 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C, sane people will get together to “take it down a notch for America”.

Not to be outdone, Stephen Colbert is having a counter-rally to Keep Fear Alive.

This is not a joke. Or rather, it is a joke, but it’s also really happening. Here’s hoping the Jon/Stephen combo can significantly outdraw Glenn Beck. Think about going. It will be fun.

Short Notes

Image of the Week: Fractal Wrongness.

Check out the Echo Park Time Travel Mart in Los Angeles. (“Whenever you are, we’re already then.”) If the slushy machine isn’t working come back yesterday. But don’t even think about buying fire if you’re pre-Neolithic. (“No upright posture, no mastery of tools — no fire.“)

Paul Krugman’s take on the folks who want the rich to keep their Bush tax cuts:

when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices. But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Jay Rosen’s lecture to French journalism students is well worth reading. Your authority as a journalist, he tells them, “begins when you do the work” of going someplace, talking to somebody, or reading something that your readers haven’t gone/talked to/read. “If an amateur or a blogger does the work, the same authority is earned.”

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

Another way to keep up with the Sift is on Facebook. (I’m still figuring out what to do with the page.)

September 20, 2010 – 2:52 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Propaganda

It is easy to find a man in almost any line of employment who is twice as efficient as another employee, but it is very rare to find one who is ten times as efficient. It is common, however, to see one man possessing not ten times but a thousand times the wealth of his neighbor.

— Willford I. King The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States (1915)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right. It’s no longer enough just to correct the specific misinformation that comes from the Right. We need to figure out how their propaganda works.
  • Distribution of Wealth. Concentrated wealth at the top isn’t just bad for the people at the bottom. It’s bad for the economy in general.
  • Short Notes. Why Koran-burning is news now. What teaching in Florida is really like. Haley Barbour’s fictional history of southern Republicans. What the WaPo can learn from Digby. And the Dutch example for dealing with teen sex.

The Weekly Sift is now on Facebook. I haven’t done much with the page yet, but keep watching. If you have advice, write on the wall.

Propaganda Lessons From the Religious Right

The most frustrating thing about this election campaign is how much of it is based on nonsense and fantasy. If we were just losing a reasonable debate about, say, the role of government, I think we’d all know what to do: go back to the drawing board and come up with better policies and better ways of explaining them.

But what if we lose because sizable numbers of people believe that President Obama is a Muslim who hates white people? Or that the new health-care law institutes death panels? Or that the Democrats are part of some sinister plot to recruit children into homosexuality or impose sharia law?

What drawing board do we go back to then?

So often we seem to be in a battle with something we can’t see. The other side makes a claim that is provably false — like that Obama has raised taxes or quadrupled the deficit — and rather than ask for examples or evidence, large numbers of people just nod their heads. We can’t get important issues like global warming or the increasing concentration of wealth on the national agenda, while the other side can conjure issues like the ground zero mosque or Obama’s czars out of thin air.

How does that work?

In a word, the problem is propaganda: The Right has the Left way outclassed in terms of propaganda. And because most of us have no idea how propaganda works, we feel like we’re battling with ghosts.

For a long time the Sift has been pruning the branches of propaganda: I do a Disinformation Watch article every now and then, and most weeks some outrageous lie gets debunked in the Short Notes. But that’s like digging up individual dandelions. The other side can produce a hundred new lies in the time it takes to debunk one.

This week I want to look at the larger structure of propaganda: Why does it work? Why are so many people so ready to believe these things?

Beyond Lying. The fundamental misconception most liberals have about propaganda is that it’s just lying: Say something false, repeat it often enough, and people will start to believe it. Superficially, “death panels” worked that way. Overnight the phrase was everywhere, repeated by so many people that it seemed like there must be something to it, even it had been exaggerated.

But if propaganda was just lying, then truth-telling would undo it. All we’d have to do would be to get more people telling our truth than their lie, and we’d win.

How often have you seen that work?

Beyond Framing. A frame is a metaphoric template that organizes the individual facts about an issue. What makes them so effective is that most of the action is unconscious: You can invoke a frame by using some of its words and images, without ever justifying that it’s the right way to think about the issue. When neo-cons talked about “appeasing” Saddam, that one word invoked the whole Hitler/Munich frame, in which the enemy is implacable and war is inevitable. And because those ideas stayed in the background, they didn’t have to support them with evidence.

The problem is that counter-framing also doesn’t work very often — for reasons that liberal framing godfather George Lakoff understands but has trouble communicating. It’s in his books, but it seldom comes across.

What most liberals miss about framing is that effective framing doesn’t happen in mid-debate. Effective framing is laid down in layers, over decades or even centuries. (Ironically, this is why the word framing frames its subject badly. Framing suggests a one-time event where you decide what’s in the picture and what’s out.)

The only way I can think to explain this is through the example of a small-but-specific issue: The current religious-right argument that anti-bullying campaigns in the schools are part of some sinister gay agenda that takes away the rights of Christian parents. And I want to describe some of the layers of frames that make their argument so undeservedly convincing and so hard to argue against.

It Starts With the Devil. Like a lot of traditional faiths, the Christian Right’s theology includes a Devil. This isn’t the place to argue about the existence of a Prince of Darkness, but I want to point out what you can do once you have a Devil in your theology.

The Devil is the ultimate sinister conspirator, motivated by pure evil. Once you have a Devil, it follows without evidence that there is a conspiracy against anything true and good and right. How could there not be? The Devil is against it, and unless he has suddenly lost his innate cleverness and his characteristic ability to lie and tempt and cajole, he will have followers.

So if you are arguing in front of a Devil-postulating audience, you don’t have prove that there is a conspiracy against the Good — of course there is — you only have to identify that conspiracy. The Manichean frame (God/Devil, Good/Evil) is sitting there, waiting for you to connect yourself with Light and your opponent with Darkness.

Once you’ve done that, the hardest part of establishing a conspiracy theory — giving it a motive — is accomplished. So when President Bush said of terrorists

They are a movement defined by their hatreds. They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.

large numbers of people just nodded their heads in recognition. They didn’t ask for evidence that such people exist or wonder why anyone would sign up with them. The Devil has minions. How could he not?

Layer II: Reverse discrimination. The second layer isn’t quite so universal as the Devil, but it has been used for decades in so many circumstances that it also can be invoked largely without evidence: Maybe the weak were persecuted generations ago, but in our era the tables have been turned, and it is actually the strong that are persecuted.

Now, it is claimed, the law favors blacks over whites, non-Christians over Christians, the poor over the rich, gays over straights, foreigners over English-speakers, illegal immigrants over citizens, and on and on and on.

In general, minority rights are controversial in a democracy, and special action is required to make things equal. But no matter how bad things are for the minority in reality, the special action can always be cast as some kind of privilege. (The Little Rock Nine were escorted by the 101st Airborne Division. But I had to fend for myself when I went to high school.)

Almost invariably, the examples of reverse discrimination fall apart when looked at closely. (The Christian church near Ground Zero that hasn’t been rebuilt yet was part of a deal involving millions in public money. It’s not an example of Christians being treated worse than Muslims.) Majorities are powerful in America, and they can get their cases favorably resolved.

This layer serves two purposes. First, it corrupts the language of equality, devaluing it in the same way that counterfeit money devalues real money. “You’re discriminated against? No, look at me, I’m discriminated against.”

But in the longer term, the second purpose is even more significant: By constant repetition, the notion that the majority is persecuted becomes axiomatic — at least in the eyes of the majority. If a minority is claiming rights and wanting government intervention, it must be trying to claim an advantage. There’s no need to specify that advantage too exactly, or to substantiate examples of majority persecution.

You can see Layers I and II working together in the claim that same-sex-marriage advocates want to destroy traditional marriage. (“this is the ultimate goal of activists,” writes James Dobson, “and they will not stop until they achieve it.”) It’s an unmotivated conspiracy of the minority to oppress the majority. What would same-sex couples gain by destroying traditional marriage? How are opposite-sex couples harmed when same-sex couples marry? Among the faithful these questions are answered by the unconscious assumptions in the frame; more specific answers are unnecessary.

Tactics. There are other layers that have taken decades to lay down — the poor are lazy, traditional sexual morality is related to non-sexual moral issues like honesty and integrity — but lets just stick with those two and see how they influence tactics. The main thing to remember is: When you work within a long-established frame, you don’t have to prove anything, you just have to fill in the blanks.

Think about Glenn Beck’s chalkboard talks. If you make yourself watch one, I predict you’ll come out saying, “What was that all about?” They’re all names and labels: So-and-so is a Marxist and is connected to this other guy who has some kind of relationship with Obama. It doesn’t sound like an assemblage of evidence, because it isn’t. He’s just helping his audience identify an enemy that abstract principles tell them must exist.

And only now do the lies come in: to vilify somebody like Van Jones. And pointing out that the lies are lies gains very little: The point is the pattern of accusations, and if this one or that one isn’t true, well, what of it?

The lies exist inside a web of mischaracterization. No enemies are quoted in complete sentences or allowed to speak in their own words at length and in context. Everything is summarized and labelled.

Applied Tactics. The easiest way to see how tactics work is to look at some small issue you haven’t thought much about before. For me this week, that was the Religious Right’s attempt to smear a campaign against bullying in schools. (It’s part of the “gay agenda” to “sneak homosexuality lessons into classrooms”.)

It’s a comparatively young smear, so you can read a nearly complete collection of documents in a short time. Start with an article called Parents beware of deceptive “anti-bullying” initiatives. (You can pull the glossier print version off the truetolerance.org main menu.)

If you come to the article wondering what is happening that you as a parent should worry about, you will be confused. LIke the Beck chalktalk, most of it goes right past the uninitiated, leaving a “What was that about?” feeling.

Instead you’ll learn that local anti-bullying organizations have “ties” to gay-friendly organizations. (Given how often bullying involves insults like “queer” or “faggot”, it would be strange if they didn’t.) They’re also “tied” to “President Obama’s controversial ‘Safe Schools czar’ Kevin Jennings”. (Czars are bad, even when they’re doing exactly what their job titles indicate.)

You’ll also learn about things that might happen or even could be happening right now: gay activists “infiltrating classrooms” which would be “transformed into indoctrination centers” with “mandatory homosexuality lessons”. But you’re well into the second page before you run into anything that actually did happen:

the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance [was] heavily involved in crafting state legislation that makes “sexual orientation” and “gender-related identity” protected categories in schools.

No clue what that would actually mean in terms of stuff happening in the schools, but it plugs into the “special rights” frame. The minority is oppressing the majority again! When good Christian kids scream “queer!” in some other kid’s face, they will be in trouble instead of the homo.

A variety of books and videos are identified as things to watch out for. They are pejoratively summarized in a few words, never linked to, and never quoted in complete sentences. The only way you can check these summaries is if they mention a title you can google and look up on your own.

(I managed to look up and read Just The Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth, a pamphlet intended for teachers and school administrators. The religious-right counter-pamphlet Just the Real Facts Please, is then easily seen to be a collection of non-sequiturs that use out-of-context quotes as excuses to go off on tangents. But how many people are going to go to that much trouble? Most will just know that there is a good pamphlet refuting the bad pamphlet.)

What to do? Imagine being a liberal parent and having a religious-right parent give you Parents Beware as part of a we-have-to-do-something talk. What can you say? You can’t argue with a case that hasn’t been made, with “ties” and sinister fantasies that don’t involve any checkable facts. It is impossible to prove that some organization you just heard of isn’t in league with the Devil.

This problem shows up again and again. Take the so-called Ground Zero Mosque: What exactly its opponents are afraid of and what exactly they want to do about it has remained fluid. Arguing about it has been like wrestling with a jello monster.

Tactically, when you have these kinds of discussions one-on-one, I recommend a judo strategy: Draw the other side out before you object. You can’t argue with unconscious assumptions, so make them state a problem and propose a solution. If they can’t, ridicule them for that — don’t take the bait and go down some tangent.

Long-term, we need to recognize that we can’t re-frame issues in mid-debate just by making up new slogans and new metaphors from scratch. The other side is using multiple layers of frames, the deepest of which have been laid down centuries ago. We need to get in touch with our own deep layers (which go back to the Enlightenment, the Sermon on the Mount, and timeless notions of fairness) and work to nurture and promote those ideas in everything we do. When we do that, we can speak with a power and authenticity that is very different from “spin”.

Wednesday in DailyKos I addressed a different level of propaganda: How right-wing money creates bogus think tanks whose bogus experts get quoted even in supposedly liberal venues like the New York Times.

Distribution of Wealth

Just about the only time I hear the phrase distribution of wealth these days is when somebody like Glenn Beck talks about redistribution of wealth — that’s when the evil Marxists come, take away the money you earned by your hard work and brilliance, and give it to the lazy stupid people.

This week, though, Slate’s Timothy Noah started a series called The Great Divergence, about why the portion of our national income that goes to the rich has grown so much over the last 30 years. (Inequality peaked just before the Great Crash in 1929, fell from the 30s through the 70s, and recently has returned to 1929 levels.)

I had planned to cover that series in this week’s Sift, but it isn’t finished yet. So next week I’ll discuss Noah’s points (and possibly the new book Winner-Take-All Politics which takes on related issues).

This week I just want to make one point: It’s no coincidence that high concentrations of wealth and bad economies go together. When you shift money from the poor and middle class to the rich, demand drops. That can turn into a deflationary cycle if business adjusts to lower demand by cutting jobs, which then lowers demand further.

What was the real difference between the Happy-Days economy of the 50s and the Grapes-of-Wrath economy of the 30s? We had the same natural resources, similar technology, similar culture. But in between, the war gave our government a reason to tax the rich and spend an enormous amount of money. That shifted the distribution of wealth, moving the economy to a high-demand, high-production mode rather than a low-demand, low-production mode.

Since the Reagan administration, we’ve been doing the reverse.

Short Notes

The best coverage of the Koran-burning minister came from Rachel Maddow:

For the most part, [this story] has been talked about in terms of religious freedom and First Amendment rights.  That‘s the way that the national, responsible mainstream media dealt with this story. But that‘s actually the wrong frame for this story. He is a kook doing as kooks do.

Religious nutjobs have burned Korans in public before and no one cared. But they’re newsworthy now because supposedly serious political figures like Newt Gingrich are mining the same vein of war-with-Islam craziness.

A major piece of the conservative government-is-evil rhetoric is to demonize everybody who gets a paycheck from the taxpayers: They’re all lazy parasites (unless they die, like the 9-11 firefighters).

From the Facebook wall of my sister the teacher, an essay by a Florida teacher explaining how things really are:.

I am required to teach Social Studies and Writing without any curriculum/materials provided, so I purchase them myself. I am required to conduct Science lab without Science materials, so I buy those, too. The budgeting process has determined that copies of classroom materials are too costly, so I resort to paying for my copies at Staples, refusing to compromise my students’ education because high-ranking officials are making inappropriate cuts. It is February, and my entire class is out of glue sticks. Since I have already spent the $74 allotted to me for warehouse supplies, if I don’t buy more, we will not have glue for the remainder of the year.

No doubt she’s living like a princess on her $28K a year.

Here’s what I wonder: Each kind of government worker — teachers, police, fire, and so on — knows that the conservative rhetoric about them is false. Do they realize that it’s false about the other government workers too? Or do they believe that the folks at the DMV are living it up?

Haley Barbour is rewriting the history of civil rights in the South to put himself and the Republican Party on the right side. The truth: When the Democrats embraced civil rights, white racists switched parties and became Republicans. And they were welcomed with open arms.

Digby points out one way in which bloggers are more thorough than Washington Post reporters: Before we quote a congressman, we’ll google him to make sure he’s real.

You know whose statistics on teen pregnancy and STDs we should envy? The permissive Dutch.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

September 13, 2010 – 2:14 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

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Hard Work

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When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”

— Don Marquis

In this week’s Sift:

  • Jobs. It’s easier to understand which policies won’t create jobs than which ones will.
  • Corporatism and Net Neutrality. The debate sounds technical, but it’s really about creating choke-points and collecting tolls.
  • Short Notes. Can liberals draw a crowd in D.C.? Why does the media provide a free platform for corporate shills? Strippers protest an Ohio church. Two-year-olds on anti-psychotics. God is funding Joe Miller’s Senate campaign. David Brooks says something uncommonly insightful about Glenn Beck’s followers. Bad Christmas presents. And more.
Jobs

What better topic for Labor Day than jobs? Everyone seems to agree that there aren’t enough jobs. But they disagree about whether and how the government can do anything about it.

Where are we? I love a good graphic, and this one explains where we are in the current recession compared to all the previous ones since World War II.

JobLossesAlignedAug2010.jpg

We’re in an unusually long and deep drop. (The graphs show the percentage of jobs lost, which eliminates the effect of increased population.) In length it’s looking about the same as the previous recession (2001), when it took about four years to get all the jobs back. In depth, it’s the worst since the Depression.

We seem to be 6-8 months past the bottom, though the upward slope isn’t very steep yet. Temporary hiring for the census created an illusion (that things were getting better faster a few months ago and that they’re getting worse now) which is smoothed out in the dotted line.

Why? Popped bubbles lead to recessions that are fundamentally different from ordinary recessions, and recovery takes longer. Bubble-popping recessions include this one, the 2001 recession (the internet bubble), the Japanese “lost decade” of the 1990s (stock and real estate), and the Great Depression.

An ordinary recession is a normal part of the business cycle, caused by a temporary excess of production and inventory in an economy that is basically healthy. Businesses get over-optimistic during an expansion, so they build too many factories, open too many stores, and hire too many people. Eventually, some minor or accidental glitch causes consumers to slow down their spending. Then retailers cancel orders, factories lay off workers, and everything snowballs for a while, as each cutback causes more people to realize they’re over-extended. Eventually, though, the overstocked inventory gets sold, factories get orders again, and everything straightens out.

That’s what happens in the real economy. In the money economy, the ordinary recession produces a liquidity crisis — people have assets of long-term value, but they need (or think they need) cash. So they try to sell things, driving prices down, and causing other people to want to sell things in a panic. Eventually wiser heads realize assets are cheap and start buying. Then the markets snap back like a rubber band.

An asset bubble, on the other hand, is based on fantasy and fraud rather than excess optimism. (The Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637 is the classic example.) In an asset bubble, large numbers of people imagine that they’re rich — and borrow and spend accordingly — because speculators have bid asset prices up higher than any rationally foreseeable economic growth can justify. When the bubble pops, formerly “rich” people can’t pay their bills, then the people they owe can’t pay their bills, and so on.

In the financial economy, the asset bubble produces a solvency crisis. In a liquidity crisis, your creditors will get their money if they just wait until you can bring your long-term assets to bear. In a solvency crisis, you are actually broke; your debts exceed any rational valuation of your assets. The question in a liquidity crisis is “Who’s willing to wait to get their money?” In a solvency crisis it’s “Who’s going to take the loss?”

The government can solve a liquidity crisis just by extending credit. (That’s why the Federal Reserve was invented.) But extending credit during a solvency crisis just delays the day of reckoning. The books don’t balance, and somebody has to take the loss.

Kinds of unemployment. One of the big debates now is about whether our unemployment is cyclical or structural. That sounds technical, but it’s actually a pretty simple idea: Cyclical unemployment is the carpenter who will get back to work when the economy picks up and people start building houses again. Structural unemployment is the mechanic who sees gobs of want ads for nurses — there are jobs, but not for him.

Cyclical unemployment is fairly easy to solve: The government runs a big deficit, lowers interest rates, and just generally pumps money into the economy. Imagine what would happen if somebody started shoveling five-dollar bills out of a helicopter: Pretty quickly the ice cream shop would have to hire back the scoopers it laid off.

Structural unemployment is trickier, because workers need to retrain. Government can help a little, but only after people get desperate enough to start over.

Paul Krugman has been arguing that our current unemployment is mainly cyclical, and that the problem with the stimulus is that it wasn’t big enough. (He argued at the time it was proposed that it wasn’t big enough.) Slate’s James Ledbetter summarizes arguments that unemployment is increasingly structural. (The Economist is big on this idea and has been for months.)

The cyclical/structural distinction is related to the optimism/fantasy distinction: Bubbles distort the economy, and the jobs that go away when they pop don’t necessarily come back. We had an irrational number of real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and home rehabbers in 2007, and a lot of them will have to find something else to do.

Still, it’s obvious that unemployment isn’t entirely structural, because there aren’t any booming sectors screaming for qualified workers. My friends’ kids are entering college now, and I don’t know what they should study to be sure of getting a job.

What won’t work: extending Bush’s tax cuts. Few job-creating ideas are as delusional as extending the Bush tax cuts. Obama wants to let them expire for those making $250,000 or more (as he promised in the campaign). Republicans argue that restoring these Clinton-era rates will primarily raise taxes on small businesspeople, who are the primary creators of jobs. Keep their taxes low and they’ll create the jobs the economy needs.

Not exactly. According to the WaPo’s “5 Myths” column:

If the objective is to help small businesses, continuing the Bush tax cuts on high-income taxpayers isn’t the way to go — it would miss more than 98 percent of small-business owners and would primarily help people who don’t make most of their money off those businesses.

Plus, the small-business-creates-jobs myth is only sort of true. A small business that is breaking out — starting to franchise nationwide, say — hires a lot of people. On the other hand, your basic family-owned restaurant or proprietor-operated shop might give the part-time help more hours if business picks up, but they rarely launch major expansions. And when they do expand, the trigger is increased consumer demand, not lower taxes.

A local friend verified this by talking to a number of proprietors on our Main Street. (Here in Nashua, Main Street is not a metaphor.) How many new people would they hire if they got a tax cut? Invariably, the answer was none.

What won’t work: lower interest rates. Robert Reich takes apart the idea that lower interest rates will create jobs. In an ordinary recovery they will, but not in an asset-bubble recovery.

Usually, low interest rates create jobs in both a supply-side and a demand-side way. On the supply side, a business that wants to expand is more likely to do so if it can get a cheap loan. But, once again, if there’s a shortage of demand, businesses aren’t going to want to expand. Why build on to your restaurant if you can’t fill the tables you have?

On the demand side, lower interest rates encourage people to borrow money to buy stuff. But:

Individuals aren’t borrowing because they’re still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they’re not in a position to borrow.

Reich sees two main results of lowering interest rates: First, a new wave of corporate acquisitions, which will have the effect of eliminating redundant jobs in the merged companies. And second, investment in new equipment that will replace workers rather than increase production. Net result: fewer jobs, not more.

What about Germany? Germany is often cited as an example of an economy that is recovering without a major government stimulus. Interesting story there: So far, Germany’s recovery is better than ours in terms of employment, but worse in terms of GDP.

Two things are different about Germany: First, they didn’t have a housing bubble, though their banks did get in trouble from investing in our worthless mortgage-backed securities.

Second, in the US, we let companies fire people and then paid them unemployment. Germany subsidized employment directly. NPR’s Marketplace explains:

Workers are building fewer trucks because demand has dropped in half this year. But MAN says it hasn’t had to lay off any of its permanent staff. That’s because it’s signed up for a government program called kurzarbeit, or short work. Workers take a cut in their hours and their pay. But the German government reimburses them for a chunk of their lost wages.

MAN spokesman Dominique Nadelhofer says employees may work as little as half time. But they still make 90 percent of their salary.

It’s hard to say what lesson we should draw from that, other than maybe what we should do next time.

Conclusion: More stimulus would help some, but it’s not clear how much, and besides, the political mood is very hostile. Democrats will do well to resist deflationary spending cuts. If the graph is right, employment should be back to 2007 levels in another year and a half.

In August, private employment went up by 67,000 jobs, but government employment dropped by 121,000 as temporary census jobs ended and the effects of the stimulus diminished. And this isn’t encouraging: “while corporate profits were generally robust in the second quarter, many companies improved their revenues by cost-cutting.”

Evidence of conservative framing success: The stimulus is often described (even in places like the NYT) as $800 billion of “federal spending”. Actually it was about $500 billion of spending and $300 billion of tax cuts.

Slate explains where Labor Day comes from: After suppressing the Pullman strike, President Cleveland wanted to curry favor with workers. But the obvious May 1 holiday would have commemorated the Haymarket Riot.

Corporatism and Net Neutrality

DailyKos’ Thutmose V posted a nice net-neutrality-for-dummies piece Monday.

Net neutrality is a good example of how corporatism works. Internet-providing corporations like Verizon and Comcast know why they care about the issue, and so they’re relentless in lobbying for their interests. Most of the public doesn’t know why they should care, and the eyes of the non-geek majority quickly glaze over when someone tries to explain.

As Thutmose makes clear, there is a legit reason why some internet traffic (like live video) would benefit if there were a high-priority lane on the internet, while other traffic (like email) wouldn’t suffer if it were shunted to a low-priority lane and arrived a second or two later.

Regulations could be written to do this without fundamentally altering the nature of the internet. The Post Office, for example, has multiple classes of mail, but they don’t deliver pro-Post-Office magazines faster than anti-Post-Office magazines.

But if the regulations are too loose, the internet corporations will gain vast new powers to prioritize however they like:

Imagine if Ford bought the Interstate Highway system, and announced that any car that was not a Ford would have to pay a high toll to use the highways. The Comcast NBC merger invites a similar situation with the Internet.  Does anyone think that Comcast might be tempted to give NBC priority on their network, and maybe charge anyone else providing [competing] content a high price to get on the net?

Comcast has disturbing history here.

Google was supposed to be a corporation whose interests coincided with consumers, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t happy with the proposal Google worked out with Verizon. Google’s interests are protected, but (according to MSNBC):

Skype would not have a chance to compete with any video telephony service Verizon might develop in the near future. And Netflix would be at a disadvantage trying to move high-quality video over Verizon’s fiber-optic pipes if Verizon decides to offer its own service.

Even if the corporations decide to play fair with each other, a fast-lane-slow-lane structure motivates them to keep the slow lane slow. The point here is to create many new choke-points where toll booths can be set up. That — and not innovation and competition — is how big corporations make big money.

For a trivial example of how corporate toll booths work, consider unlisted phone numbers. The LA Times’ David Lazarus reports that the monthly cost of an unlisted number varies from $1.25 (ATT) to $1.99 (Time Warner Cable) per month — in exchange for changing a bit in their database and then not publishing your number:

Time Warner and other telecom companies are charging for a service that consists of them basically not doing anything. And because they continue not to do anything month after month, they keep charging you on the grounds that it’s a recurring service.

He points out that Time Warner Cable doesn’t even publish a phone book — it just distributes information to whoever has the local phone book contract. So the “service” is purely a toll TWC can charge because it happens to be the gate-keeper.

Kevin Drum elaborates:

phone companies are regulated monopolies. If I want phone service, I have no choice but to contract with a tiny number of suppliers who then have privileged information about me. Should I also pay them protection money for withholding my Social Security number or my date of birth from their phone books?

The job every corporation really wants is Gate Keeper. You do nothing, employ nobody, and collect tolls. Wait, I’m wrong, you do employ some people: lobbyists who help you create new choke-points where new gates can be installed.

Short Notes

I can’t make it to D.C. on October 2. Can you?

We used to mourn when the independent bookstores were driven out of business by Barnes and Noble. Now we mourn when the Barnes and Noble closes.

The NYT had a “Room for Debate” feature on the great egg recall and what’s wrong with the egg industry. Rather than discuss the issue, though, I want to step back and look at the contributors: a food safety activist, some university professors in relevant fields, and then a guy from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch brothers.

The Cato guy, predictably, says that “The Panic Will Subside” and so there’s no need for new regulations. That’s because Cato’s mandate is not public health, but fighting government regulation of business. Every Cato article concludes that regulations are unnecessary, and the only mystery is how it will arrive at that conclusion. (This guy says that regulations will necessarily favor big egg producers over small ones. But of course Cato cares no more about small egg producers than it cares about public health. Whoever makes no-government-regulations a sympathetic position is Cato’s new best friend.)

Here’s my question: Why do we routinely let these guys into the room, even though they have no interest in solving the problem, whatever it is? Every well-rounded debate panel has to include a shill for our corporate overlords, who will argue in bad faith until he arrives at his pre-ordained conclusion. And we accept this without a second thought.

Second City Network gives its explanation for Jan Brewer’s mental glitch during her opening statement at the Arizona gubernatorial debate.

An Ohio church protests the local strip club on Saturday nights. Lately the dancers have been returning the favor on Sunday mornings.

The Onion captures the spirit of bigotry perfectly in Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims.

Disturbing article in Thursday’s NYT about the growing number of very young children being prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. Given that my wife is a two-time cancer survivor and my parents swear by their anti-depressants, I’m usually unimpressed by articles about the evils of modern medicine. But this caught my attention:

A Columbia University study recently found a doubling of the rate of prescribing antipsychotic drugs for privately insured 2- to 5-year-olds from 2000 to 2007. Only 40 percent of them had received a proper mental health assessment, violating practice standards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

NYT columnists Gail Collins and David Brooks are mostly just fooling around during this conversation, but then Brooks lets loose the following bit of insight into the 8-28 Beck rally and the Tea Party mindset in general:

Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control. The Germans have a Christian Democratic set of institutions, enforced by law. The Swedes have their egalitarianism. Since the days of Jonathan Edwards, we have developed a quasi-religious spirituality that informally restrains the excesses of the market. God and Mammon are intertwined.

Many people feel that the values side of this arrangement is dissolving. Both the government and Wall Street are leaping into the void, to bad effect. … People like those at last weekend’s rally want the Judeo-Christian ethic back, which sweetened and softened life on the frontier (physical or technological). And so they march. They are only vaguely aware of this value system. It is so entwined into their very nature, they can not step back and define it. But they feel it weakening.

It might be possible for a responsible person to tap into this sense, but none has, so Glenn Beck has.

That’s why I find Brooks to be the most frustrating columnist in America today. He’ll write nothing but nonsense for months, and then off-handedly say something like that.

Check out Vanity Fair’s look at Sarah Palin.

As best I can tell, this is not a joke: Alaskan Senate candidate Joe Miller wants you to help God fund his campaign.

It’s never too early to start thinking about what not to get your little girl for Christmas.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

 

September 6, 2010 – 11:19 am Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Unseen Mechanisms

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

— Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations”

from his book Propaganda (1928)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Why Democrats Are Always on Defense. You’d think a party with only 41 senators would be on the run, desperately trying to prove that it’s still rational and relevant. You’d think that they’d have to come up with new ideas and prove to the electorate that they’ve changed. Nope. What makes Republicans so different from Democrats?
  • One Bad Egg Leads to a Half-Billion More. The guy behind the salmonella-tainted eggs is a serial rule-breaker, but he always makes more in profit than he pays in fines.
  • The King Legacy. Martin Luther King is now accepted as an American hero. So of course he would be a conservative today and would be proud that Glenn Beck is carrying forward his vision. Or something like that.
  • Short Notes. More pictures of the week. Scott Pilgrim. Fox News’ terrorist prince. Bad colleges. What the stimulus really did. And more.
Why Democrats Are Always on Defense

When Democrats were completely out of power, in 2005 or so, we were always told we needed to “move to the center” to have any hope of coming back. We needed to say moderate things, keep our radicals in the closet, and compromise with Republicans to show how reasonable we were.

Then everything associated with the Republican went bust — the wars, the economy, corruption in Congress, Katrina — and the tables turned. Landslide Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 put the Republicans even further out of power than the Democrats ever were. Obama’s 2008 victory margin was many times Bush’s 2004 margin. The Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress were bigger than anything the Republicans had mustered.

So what did Republicans do? Rethink their agenda? Compromise? Shift left? Nope. They’ve voted No on everything, they’ve got their wildest and wooliest we-make-our-own-reality candidates out there, and some current projections have them retaking the House. What’s more, they seem to have control of the national conversation: If they want to make the so-called ground zero mosque an issue, then it’s an issue.

How does that work exactly?

George Lakoff explains, using his often-misunderstood model of frames.

The frustrating and somewhat ironic thing about being a Lakoff fan (as I have been for years) is that the theory of frames is so often mis-framed as sloganeering, as if it denied the importance of real ideas and proposals.

Let me see if I can frame framing better than Lakoff usually does. Suppose you’re a 20-something guy working in an office with a woman you’d like to go out with. It’s not an unreasonable idea: you have pleasantly shared a cafeteria table a couple of times. Now, there are at least four different ways she could picture your relationship: (1) co-workers who get along; (2) co-workers who could become friends outside the office; (3) co-workers who could become a couple; and (4) stalker and victim.

Those are frames — large-scale templates into which events and conversations can be placed — and they are all in her head already, simultaneously. So as you look for  ways to get her attention, things to talk about, activities to suggest, favors to do, or other ways to show interest, the goal is to activate (3), not get trapped in (1) or (2), and make sure (4) never crosses her mind.

That way of strategizing is very different than just “having a good line”. (Lakoff would call the good line “messaging”, not “framing”.) And it’s not magic: If (3) isn’t in her head at all, or if she’s already concluded that (4) is going on, nothing is going to work.

OK, translate to politics. Lakoff is convinced that on most issues a large number of Americans are “biconceptual”. In other words, they can picture the issue more than one way, and support different outcomes depending on how they picture it. Depending on how the topic comes up, they might picture unwed teen mothers either as Bristol Palin or as slum-dwelling drug addicts. What they say should be done about unwed teen mothers could be very different in those two conversations.

So now imagine you’re a liberal trying to pass a teen-pregnancy bill. You could take a poll of four proposals and put forward the most liberal one that gets majority support. That approach is currently seen as “practical” and “realistic”. But it takes the national conversation as given. It doesn’t even consider the question: How many people could support the proposal I really want if I changed the national conversation?

Worse, it ignores this possibility: Coming out in favor of the poll-supported moderate bill could in itself change the national conversation in a way that invalidates the poll. Maybe you’ll move the whole conversation to the right so that it then becomes “practical” for you to take an even more conservative position.

For example, you can see that happening in the ground-zero-mosque issue, where starting the conversation in four different places leads to four different conclusions:

  1. Muslims share the same religious freedom all other Americans have. (So: their beliefs should have nothing to do with what they can build.)
  2. Muslims were responsible for 9-11. (So it’s not appropriate for them to build close to Ground Zero. Let them build the Park 51 project somewhere else.)
  3. Some American Muslims are loyal to our country and some aren’t. (So you have to look at the background of the Cordoba Initiative and Imam Rauf before deciding whether they should be allowed to build anywhere.)
  4. Muslims can’t be good Americans because America is at war with Islam. (Mosques by definition are recruiting centers for terrorists, so the fewer that get built, the better.)

Lots of Americans are biconceptual about this: They could see the issue more than one way. But if you take a poll, (1)&(2) put together give you a majority. So a “practical” Democrat does what Harry Reid did and comes out for (2). Nod towards the constitutional right to build as in (1), but recommend that Imam Rauf be wise enough to build somewhere else.

But look how that changes the conversation. Now all the Democrats supporting (1) have to explain why they can’t be as “reasonable” as Reid, and Republicans who support (2) will have to face the dreaded “So you agree with Harry Reid?” Also, Reid has unintentionally validated a lot of people’s vague notion that Islam is not like other religions, so support for (3) and (4) goes up. And people who promote (4) are emboldened, knowing that the principled opposition to them is crumbling.

I don’t have data to back this up, but I believe that by adopting the poll-driven position, Reid and other “moderate” Democrats have changed the poll. The center is now moving towards (3).

This happens on issue after issue. On health care, it happened many times: One “compromise” position after another got recast as the socialist government take-over.

Republicans never make this mistake. They have a few very abstract basic frames, like “taxes and regulations hurt the economy”; “traditional values make society strong”; “America’s enemies are insane or evil, so they have to be intimidated, not reasoned with”; and a handful of others. Everything they do gets couched in those terms, so they are constantly building those ideas up. When the electorate goes against them, they don’t compromise, they try to turn the conversation back into channels that work in their favor.

One reason conservatives can function differently is that they have a huge infrastructure. Out-of-office Democrats disappear from public view or sell out to corporate interests as lobbyists, while out-of-office Republicans like Palin and Huckabee and Rove get showcased by Fox News. Staffers of defeated Democrats have to pound the pavement looking for their next job, while Republican staffers have jobs waiting at Cato or Heritage or one of the other think-tanks.

That conservative infrastructure requires lots of money, and they don’t get it by passing the hat among ordinary Americans. Naturally, a lot of it comes from corporations, but a lot also comes from individual billionaires.

A recent New Yorker article by Jane Mayer profiled one of the biggest sources: the Koch brothers, owners of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in America. (Sift readers already knew about the Kochs — pronounced “Coke” — from a Greenpeace report I pointed you to in April.)

A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

Mayer quotes an environmental lawyer’s account of how the game works:

You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank, [which] hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.

One Bad Egg Leads to a Half-Billion More

I wasn’t going to say much about the massive egg recall, but Grist has three great articles on it. First, a clip of Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) talking to CNN’s Sanjay Gupta:

Cheap food is wonderful. We all like cheap food. But we have to understand that when we’re spending billions to deal with a salmonella outbreak, it isn’t really as cheap as it seems.

Stephen Budiansky’s NYT piece extolling the efficiency of factory farming (Math Lessons for Locavores) drew an intelligent response from Tom Philpott: The half-billion egg salmonella recall illustrates that efficiency cuts both ways. A small number of vast, interlocking producers is an efficient way to distribute pathogens as well as eggs.

And finally, Grist profiles Jack DeCoster, the guy behind the half-billion bad eggs. He’s a bad egg himself, responsible for a long series of health, environment, and worker-safety violations going back to 1996. He’s paid millions in fines, but that’s just part of the cost of doing business.

The King Legacy

Saturday was the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”. So of course a lot of white people got together on the spot of Dr. King’s speech to listen to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Beck said the date-and-place correspondence was unintentional. (Actually, he attributed it to “divine providence”. God doesn’t let anything happen to Beck accidentally.) But then he decided it was appropriate because “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.” Which brought this response from Jon Stewart:

Black people don’t own Martin Luther King. White people own … Oh, wait. … That’s not right.

But Glenn feels he has to speak out to defend Dr. King’s legacy because

Far too many have even gotten just lazy, or they have purposefully distorted Martin Luther King’s ideas of “judge a man by the content of this character.” Lately in the last twenty years we’ve been told that character doesn’t matter.

I often wish real life were like Wikipedia, and I could just insert a [citation needed] at points like this. Has anyone ever seriously put forward the idea that “character doesn’t matter”? Who? When?

Beck claimed King’s legacy even more emphatically on May 26.

We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we [citation needed] were the people that did it in the first place.

No idea what he’s talking about there. (The people who actually “did it in the first place” have a web site.)

This much is clear: The Right may have harassed and vilified King while he was alive, but now that he is safely dead (and, they hope, remembered only as a collection of sound bites) they want to give him a conservative make-over. (I’ve commented elsewhere on the make-over Beck has given Thomas Paine.)

And it’s surprisingly easy: After you have co-opted words like character and freedom and God, you have the high ground and your tanks can roll on to conquer King’s legacy at will.

After all, King ended his speech by dreaming of a day when all people could join in singing:

Free at last. Free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

And isn’t that just what Beck and the other Tea Party folks stand for? After all, what could King possibly have meant by free if not free from taxes, free from unions, free from foreign languages, free from having to explain gays to your kids, free to keep mosques out of your neighborhood, free from scientific facts you don’t want to believe, free to work in unsafe conditions if you want to (or if you can’t get a job anywhere else), free to go without health insurance, free to say “nigger” or any other word you feel like saying (and free from criticism if you do), free to refuse service to anybody you don’t like, free to put as much CO2 into the atmosphere as strikes your fancy, and so on.

You know, free. Like Martin said. Free at last.

I’m not even going to argue about it right now, because even that misses the point. Having a he-said-she-said struggle over King’s legacy is a poor way to celebrate King’s legacy.

Here’s what I think people should do in honor of the Dream speech: Read it. Or listen to it. Don’t let Martin Luther King become a symbol that people fight to own, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Let him continue to be a voice that we listen to. Read the ten demands of King’s March on Washington (including #7: “A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers — Negro and white — in meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.”) Read the Letter from the Birmingham Jail. Pick some speech or sermon of King’s at random and read it.

See for yourself.

I went rambling through the KIng speeches and found this one delivered in Grosse Pointe, Michigan a month before his assassination. This part seemed relevant to current arguments between moderate and liberal Democrats:

We started dramatizing the issue of the denial of the right to vote and I submit to you that three months later as a result of that Selma movement, the same President who said to me that we could not get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress was on the television singing through a speaking voice “we shall overcome” and calling for the passage of a voting rights bill . . . and we did get a voting rights bill in that session of Congress. Now, I could go on to give many other examples to show that it just doesn’t come about without pressure

Short Notes

Ghost Day in Taiwan, Festival of the Tooth in Sri Lanka, lightning on Lake Geneva — it’s just another Week in Pictures.

Two reviewers who take pride in missing the point: Don Hazen wishes for a Mad Men character “we can respect and cheer for” — precisely the 21st-century time traveler that most period shows provide and Mad Men brilliantly does not. And Seth Schiesel is a gamer who doesn’t grasp that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not about video games. (It uses the narrative motifs of video games to re-envision the romantic comedy.)

Scott Pilgrim, BTW, is the most original movie I’ve seen in a long time, and one of its video-game motifs solves a problem the romantic comedy has been struggling with for decades: the ending. Nobody really believes the happily-ever-after ending any more, but the romantic comedy has never come up with a replacement. So movies have been winking knowingly at happily-ever-after at least since that what-now series of expressions Dustin Hoffman flashed at the end of The Graduate. But they’ve been stuck with it.

In Scott Pilgrim, the star-crossed couple conquers its obstacles and gets to the door. What’s behind the door? Obviously: the next level, whatever that may be. This video-game metaphor for success is the most satisfying and realistic ending a romantic comedy could have these days.

The photography and online video is stunning in the New York Times Magazine piece on the power game in women’s tennis.

Last week I linked to Jon Stewart’s demonstration of how Fox News’ guilt-by-association methods could be used to link Fox News itself to terrorism — through their parent company’s second largest stockholder, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. (There’s no particular reason to think the Prince is a terrorist, but he’s easy to link to radical Wahhabist sects of Islam through his family.)

Well, Fox didn’t learn its lesson. Last Monday morning, Fox & Friends was speculatively tracing the potential funding sources for the Ground Zero Mosque, and made sinister implications about the Kingdom Foundation, a Saudi charity headed by “a guy who … funds radical madrassas all over the world.”

The “guy” was never named, but he turns out to be — you guessed it, right? — Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. So Jon just had do a follow-up report suggesting that the way to shut off funds to the Ground Zero Mosque is to stop watching Fox News, because money they make goes to the Prince who might give it to the mosque project.

He went on to wonder whether the folks on Fox & Friends knew they were slandering their second-largest stockholder, and maybe that’s why they didn’t mention his name. He then brought two Daily Show regulars to discuss whether Fox didn’t connect these dots because they were stupid and didn’t know, or evil and intentionally hiding their own connections. John Oliver represented Team Stupid and Wyatt Cenac Team Evil.

Washington Monthly turns a searchlight on bad colleges that go on for years with microscopic graduation rates. It turns out that even among colleges that accept low-income students with low grades and test scores, graduation rates vary widely. Some colleges have graduation rates as low as 5%. And the difference isn’t that they maintain high standards:

the colleges that successfully graduate low-income and minority students don’t ask less of them. They ask more. Researchers have found that more challenging coursework makes success rates go up, not down.

Why are these dropout factories tolerated? Why do they continue to get state funds and why are students allowed to waste government grants and loans on them? Because “the world is run by college graduates” who didn’t go to such places and have no idea what goes on there. If you start with students nobody cares about and don’t help them rise, nobody will hear about your failure.

Stephen Colbert takes on the how-Obama-can-prove-he’s-not-Muslim problem. Solution: He needs to be more Christlike and let his enemies crucify him.

On OpenLeft, Paul Rosenberg brings Matthew 25:42-43 up to date:

I was unemployed and you called me a lazy good for nothing bum. I was old and you called me a “greedy geezer”. I was a stranger, and you cursed me and cast me out. I was sick and you looked after the insurance company. I was in prison and you said, “Why isn’t he dead”?

What did the stimulus do? A lot of good stuff.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

August 30, 2010 – 2:41 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Humble, Competent People

If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid.

— John Maynard Keynes, 1931

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Sift Bookshelf: ECONned by Yves Smith. The writer of the blog Naked Capitalism has a new book explaining the financial collapse. It’s comprehensive, readable, and not at all pretty or reassuring. She believes the lessons of the crisis were not learned, and won’t be learned until something even worse happens.
  • It’s Important, But It’s Not News. Some of the most significant stories play out too slowly to get the news media’s attention. Here are two: A gene conferring antibiotic resistance on bacteria can jump from one strain to another, so many different diseases might soon be untreatable again. And global warming was supposed to increase plant growth, which would trap carbon and slow the process down. But it’s not working out that way.
  • Short Notes. Disbelief in global warming is becoming a standard Republican position. Palin still doesn’t understand the First Amendment. The surface slick is gone, but the underwater oil plume is still there. The Ground Zero Church. And more.
The Sift Bookshelf: ECONned by Yves Smith

I’m still trying to figure out what happened in the financial collapse of 2008. In April I reviewed The Big Short by Michael Lewis, which gave a trader’s perspective and boiled the whole thing down to one problem: The Wall Street investment banks figured out how to trick the ratings agencies into giving AAA ratings to crap investments, and once that hole-in-the-system existed, they did the logical predatory thing and ran as much money through it as they could. Something-for-nothing deals have to collapse eventually, and the collapse of this one ate up trillions.

I still think that’s a true story, but it begs some larger questions: Such a story can only happen in a certain kind of world. How did we come to be living in that world? And why can’t we seem to get out of it?

Yves Smith’s ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism provides a larger context for the collapse and explains why it is likely to happen again.

Economics. Rather than a single point of failure, Smith describes problems on many levels. She starts with economics — both the way it has developed and the way it has been popularized for political discussion.

Since World War II, economics research has become increasingly mathematical. An economist makes his/her name by expressing something economical in an equation, and then proving that equation from more abstract assumptions.

The problem is that economics is not really that kind of science; inherently it’s more like sociology than like physics. So turning an economy into a mathematical model involves making very unrealistic assumptions. (For a detailed criticism of those assumptions, see Eric Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth, which I reviewed last year.)

Several of those bad assumptions play a role in the 2008 collapse:

  • Random distributions are normal distributions. Normal distributions are the easiest to deal with mathematically, but it’s well known that actual economic variables have much fatter tails than a normal distribution. In laymen’s terms: Extreme events that the model says happen every million years might in fact happen every ten or twenty years.
  • Markets tend toward equilibrium. Engineers who design complex systems understand that there’s a trade-off between efficiency and stability: Things that work really well (when they work) have a disturbing tendency to blow up (when they don’t). But if you assume from the outset that markets are stable — that’s what this assumption boils down to — then you can ignore those nasty explosions and focus all your attention on efficiency.
  • Perfect information. The easiest markets to model are the ones where everybody knows everything. But if some participants have inside knowledge and use it to exploit the others — that’s more like sociology than physics. It’s hard to put into an equation.
  • Uncorrelated markets stay uncorrelated. In normal times, gold trading in Zurich has nothing to do with wheat trading in Chicago which has nothing to do with the price of houses in Las Vegas. But in a crisis all markets are correlated — because people who need to raise cash in a hurry sell everything they can.

If all these bad assumptions led economists to conclude that we should confiscate wealth and distribute it to the poor, the powers that be would see through them instantly. But conveniently, they lead to a result that is attractive to the kind of corporations and plutocrats who hire economists and support business schools: Business should be free to do what it wants, and the invisible hand of the market will make it all come out right.

So procedural bias has aligned with patron bias — the technique you want to use gives you the answer that your sponsor wants to hear. Why question it?

This creates economic “common sense” that is actually nonsensical. And that’s why regulators like Alan Greenspan decided that they didn’t need to intervene in the housing bubble or the debt explosion, and why the Clinton administration went along with leaving credit default swaps unregulated. Their common sense told them to trust the market.

The same economic common sense told people that greed is good; the market would sort it out and impose whatever moral discipline was necessary. And so everyone discounted the problem that Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen illustrates with this little story:

”Where is the railway station?” he asks me. “There,” I say, pointing to the post office, “and would you please post this letter for me on the way?” “Yes,” he says, determined to open the envelope and check whether it contains something valuable.

In other words, if everyone looks for selfish advantage in every interaction, nothing works. Every-man-for-himself competition only makes sense as a small component carefully constrained inside a system of honesty and cooperation.

Wall Street corporate culture. Wall Street investment banks increasingly have adopted the total-selfishness model Sen was criticizing. Traditionally, the goal of an investment bank was to have long-term relationships with large, profitable corporations — and to help them become larger and more profitable. (You can see this same attitude in the ad agency of Mad Men. Don Draper is no saint, but he sees his interests as aligned with his clients’ interests.)

Over the last few decades, investment banks have shifted from a long-term relationship model to a short-term trading model, where the goal is to make as much money as possible on every transaction. That means taking advantage of the client whenever possible — buyer beware — even if it destroys the relationship and even if it destroys the client altogether.

The result was predictable to anyone who understood Sen’s point: A banker who sees his clients as prey will soon start seeing his stockholders as prey too. The trader who cares nothing for his long-term relationship with the client will also not care about his long-term relationship with his firm. And so trades that create short-term profits (and bonuses) but put the firm in long-term danger — those are good trades from the perspective of a short-term predator.

The final stages of the financial collapse — the ones that made even masters-of-the-universe like Goldman Sachs insolvent without a government bailout — involved complex transactions that tricked internal accounting systems into booking future profits as current profits (and paying bonuses on them), even though those future profits would ultimately turn into losses. The pirates pillaged their own firms.

Smith is one of the few authors to call this what it is: looting.

Bailout and reform. By the time things unraveled in 2008, the government had to do something and it was going to cost the taxpayers money. The economy would have collapsed otherwise.

But what the government did — under both Bush and Obama — was to replace the looted money and otherwise leave the system untouched. They treated the collapse as a glitch, not as a structural problem that needed a structural solution. (And not as incompetence that required a wholesale housecleaning of every bailed-out firm.)

What’s more, the same policy-makers who watched it all happen and made excuses for Wall Street as the looting unfolded — Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke and others — are overseeing the reform process, such as it is.

Smith concludes:

We have not built enough checks into the process to assure that the banking class will not go out and create the same train wrecks again on a grander scale. In fact, as things stand now, they are almost guaranteed to do precisely that.

If this were just corruption, it would be bad enough. But Smith points to a deeper problem she calls “cognitive regulatory capture”: The Geithners and Bernankes share the economic common sense that created the disaster, and they don’t know how to look at the world differently.

To a lesser extent, the American people share this economic common sense as well. So although the public would relish sending a few bankers to jail, free-market rhetoric is still popular and there is little political support for any alternate financial vision.

And finally, there is a truth no one wants to face up to: Economic growth used to be based on increased employment and increased wages — which led to increased consumer spending and increased production in a virtuous cycle. Recent booms have been based on asset bubbles that created collateral for increased debt. Consequently,

no one seems prepared to accept that healthier practices will result in much more costly and less readily available debt.

At the moment, no one has painted a convincing picture of how we get the economy moving again without another debt-based asset bubble. Until the public has such a picture firmly in mind, it will look at a future without cheap debt the way that an addict looks at a future without drugs.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi shares Smith’s skepticism about the post-crisis reforms in his article Wall Street’s Big Win:

During the yearlong legislative battle that forged [the Dodd-Frank] bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.

He also sees regulatory capture:

Throughout the negotiations over the bill, in fact, Geithner acted almost like a liaison to the financial industry, pushing for Wall Street-friendly changes on everything from bailouts (his initial proposal allowed the White House to unilaterally fork over taxpayer money to banks in unlimited amounts) to high-risk investments (he fought to let megabanks hold on to their derivatives desks).

And the underlying problem:

In a sense, the failure of Congress to treat the disease is a tacit admission that it has no strategy for our economy going forward that doesn’t involve continually inflating and reinflating speculative bubbles. Which sucks, because what happened to our economy over the past three years, and is still happening to it now, was not an accident or an oversight, but a sweeping crime wave unleashed by a financial industry gone completely over to the dark side.

Both ECONned and The Big Short make a point that bears repeating: The financial sector makes so much money because it is so inefficient.

In the standard Econ 101 capitalist fantasy, that statement makes no sense. The whole justification for profit is that entrepreneurs add value to the system either by enabling people to do new things or do the same things more cheaply. On the surface profit looks like money taken out of the system, but in fact it’s just a small slice of the value entrepreneurs put into the system.

Take Henry Ford, for example. His combination of assembly line production and mass marketing made it possible for middle-class people to afford cars. He made $100 million in a single year in the 1920s, but so what? Even after subtracting his profit, he added value to the American economy.

If the bankers were doing something similar, if they were just siphoning off a portion of the value they add to the financial system, who could grudge it to them? They’d be matching up lenders and borrowers more efficiently; creating a payments system that got money from buyers to retailers with less overhead; writing more transparent, more accessible insurance policies that helped people insure exactly what they needed to for less money. We’d all benefit from their actions.

But they’re not doing any of that. None of the new financial products concocted during the bubble years created value for ordinary people. Instead, they invented confusing products precisely so that they could sell people things they didn’t need, get them to take risks they didn’t understand and couldn’t afford, and trick them into paying large fees that weren’t obvious when the contracts were signed.

This is not the everybody-wins capitalism of Econ 101. The huge salaries and bonuses of the bankers are simply a drain on the economy. We get nothing back from them.

It’s Important, But It’s Not News

News is whatever has happened since the last time we talked. So CNN thinks of news in minute-to-minute terms, newspapers day-to-day, and Time week-to-week. Only at high school reunions are multi-year processes considered news.

But important things do happen on a five-year or twenty-year or hundred-year timescale. When should CNN tell you about them? To their credit, CNN and other news outlets sneak them in once in a while (if they can be tied to something that happened since the last time you tuned in). But if you blink, you miss them.

Here are two that crossed my radar screen recently:

New antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Somewhere in the back of your mind you probably already know about drug-resistant bacteria like MRSA (staph) or XDR-TB (tuberculosis) or C-DIFF. Well, those pesky bugs are just the overture. It’s going to get a lot worse over the next 10 years or so.

The underlying problem is that overuse of antibiotics creates an environment where drug-resistance can evolve. Every time we rain antibiotic hell down on some population of bacteria, the germs that are less susceptible to that antibiotic get an advantage over their competition. Over time, the bugs pick up one resistance after another.

We used to think about resistance in terms of individual strains of bacteria, but now researchers have discovered the NDM-1 gene

which passes easily between types of bacteria called enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae and makes them resistant to almost all of the powerful, last-line group of antibiotics called carbapenems.

So NDM-1 is not just a small step for a germ, it’s a giant leap for germ-kind. It works like this:

The gene is carried on a plasmid, a small section of DNA that can move from one bug to another, passing on drug-resistance as it goes. These have, according to the paper [in the current issue of Lancet], “an alarming potential to spread and diversify among bacterial populations.”

The gene’s discoverer, Professor Tim Walsh of Cardiff University, comments:

Even if scientists started work immediately on discovering new antibiotics against the threat, there will be nothing available soon. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.

NDM-1 bacteria apparently are already widespread in India. Medical tourism — Brits saving money by getting their surgeries done in India — is bringing it back to the United Kingdom. From there, who knows?

The potential problem isn’t just plague-like infections that so far haven’t surfaced. Antibiotics provide the foundation on which the rest of modern medicine has been built. Without effective antibiotics, organ transplants are impossible and every abdominal surgery is life-threatening.

Plants aren’t keeping pace with global warming. A few years ago scientists thought that as the Earth got warmer, the total planetary plant mass would increase too. It seemed to make sense: warmer weather, longer growing seasons, more and bigger plants.

Plants capture carbon out of the air and hold it in their bodies, so plant growth would be a stabilizing factor: People putting more carbon into the atmosphere would lead to more plants taking it out.

It’s not happening.

Global plant growth is now overall declining and this is because, while some areas are still benefiting from an increased growing season, other areas are starting to be retarded by drought and water deficits

If an extended growing season would help anywhere, it would be someplace with long winters and good soil. Someplace like, say, Russia. See the problem?

So it turns out that plants (like shrinking polar icecaps) are a de-stablizing factor in global warming: The more carbon in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets, and the more the deserts expand, leading to plants taking less carbon out of the atmosphere.

Short Notes

At a debate among New Hampshire Republican Senate candidates, all six agreed that man-made global warming is unproven. When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson about global warming, he said “I think it’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity.”  Asked what he thinks CO2 does in the atmosphere, Johnson said, “I think it’s sucked down by trees and helps trees grow.”

Sarah Palin continues to have no idea what the First Amendment says. She thinks it means that she and the people who agree with her shouldn’t be criticized for saying crazy things — and she’s been remarkably consistent about that interpretation for the last two years.

The BP oil slick may be gone from the surface, but there’s a mile-wide, 20-mile long plume about 3600 feet down. A Florida State oceanographer told Congress:

I expect the hydrocarbon imprint of the BP discharge will be detectable in the marine environment for the rest of my life. The oil is not gone and is not going away anytime soon.

A lot has been made of the poll showing that increasing numbers of Americans (18% now) think President Obama is a Muslim, but I think they’re missing the real point: How would you know — not just suspect, but objectively know — if the media were biased and that one side or the other had a propaganda advantage?

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? If people were getting biased information, they’d believe false things that slanted in one direction. Like “Obama’s a Muslim” or “Obama wasn’t born in this country“. Crazy crap like that.

Jon Stewart demonstrates how the same techniques Fox uses to connect the imam behind the Ground Zero Mosque to terrorism can also connect Rupert Murdoch..

And what’s up with that church near Ground Zero that Fox cares so much about? Is it getting worse treatment than the mosque? No. The hold-up is about whether it will get a public subsidy to rebuild, an issue that doesn’t apply to the mosque.

Each story I hear about the Christianization of our armed forces is a little more outrageous than the last one. Here, Chris Rodda reports about a company being marched out to attend a Christian rock concert, with those who opt out being put on maintenance duty instead.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

August 23, 2010 – 1:17 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Risks and Sacrifices

We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.

— Albert Einstein, 1930

In this week’s Sift:

  • Lining Up the Next War. Talk about attacking Iran stopped for a while after Obama got elected. It’s back.
  • Fire, Flood, Drought. The bad stuff that’s happening this summer doesn’t necessarily prove global warming, but it’s the kind of thing you can expect to see more of if the Earth keeps getting hotter.
  • Short Notes. The L.A. Times’ Framework site is a stunning collection of topical photos. Glenn Beck sounds more and more like an evangelist, or maybe a messiah. Why Palin won’t run. A bogus argument for repatriating Muslims. VW’s prototype Dung Beetle. Government isn’t spending as much as you think. And more.
Lining Up the Next War

In the 19th century, a grain trader (in a reference I’ve never been able to find again) remarked that studying the fluctuations of the wheat market was like watching a wrestling match with a blanket thrown over it: You can tell when the wrestlers are doing something, but not what it is or who is doing it.

I had the same feeling this week when the idea of war with Iran surfaced again. During the Bush administration this used to happen every few months. Someone who wanted us to attack Iran would leak some (possibly false) information about how they were closer to building nuclear weapons than previously thought, and the right-wing media would go wild. Or someone who didn’t want war would leak some (possibly false) information that the decision to attack Iran had already been made, and the administration was in the process of creating the official justifications. Then the left-wing media would go wild.

I have gotten cynical about all this: It’s a wrestling match under a blanket. I can’t figure out who really wants us to attack Iran and why, or who is opposing them and why. As we saw in the build-up to the Iraq War, the reasons that appear in the media are almost all attempts at manipulation. It is difficult to figure out who really believes what.

President Obama’s election ended that talk for a while. But it started again this week with Jeffrey Goldberg’s article (“The Point of No Return“) which is on the cover of the current Atlantic. (Well, it really started two weeks before that in the Weekly Standard, a publication so far to the right that it’s hard to take seriously. What country do they want to live in peace with?)

Goldberg’s article begins with a list of all the peaceful ways a crisis could be avoided, and then concludes that none are likely.

What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran … They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

Goldberg’s visions are dramatically specific: names, timetables, model numbers of airplanes. His highly placed Israeli sources have reached “consensus … that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”

Once we take that “better than 50 percent chance” as a given, Goldberg’s next question is whether it would be better for the United States to launch the attack instead: Our air force is bigger and would have a better chance of success. An anonymous source identified as an “Arab foreign minister” thinks we should attack, or at least make a serious bluff:

Iran will continue on this reckless path, unless the administration starts to speak unreasonably. The best way to avoid striking Iran is to make Iran think that the U.S. is about to strike Iran.

And of course these Arab countries will all rejoice if we do attack, just as Iraqis greeted us as liberators. And the democracy movement in Iran will rally around us rather than around their own government. And as Iranians are having their noses rubbed in the dirt, they will not think: “We really do need nuclear weapons.”

It’s striking how Goldberg’s article appears to set a reasonable tone, while simultaneously removing all serious points of contention from the discussion: He takes as given that the Iranians are bent on getting nuclear weapons as soon as possible, and doesn’t even mention that the most recent National Intelligence Estimate disagrees. And besides, what matters is not what is true, but what the Israelis believe. They feel threatened, so there will be war; our only choice is what kind of war it will be.

He offers the possibility that maybe the threat of an American strike will be enough. But of course if it isn’t, we’ll then have to go through with the threat, won’t we? Not because it will work — that’s another possible point of contention that is somehow irrelevant — but because we’d lose credibility.

And the dire scenarios that justify the risks of war never justify corresponding risks of peace-making: The vision of a nuclear-free Middle East, with Israel’s WMD programs also on the table, never comes up:

The most crucial component of Israeli national-security doctrine, a tenet that dates back to the 1960s, when Israel developed its own nuclear capability as a response to the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, is that no regional adversary should be allowed to achieve nuclear parity with the reborn and still-besieged Jewish state.

Unalterable. Carved in stone. Reasonable people wouldn’t even question it. Why can’t those crazy Iranians just accept that they live under the nuclear hegemony of a hostile power?

Other writers have taken up the details of Goldberg’s argument: Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in Foreign Policy, Glenn Greenwald, and Jonathan Schwarz, just to name a few.

They point out that Goldberg has done this before: in a 2002 New Yorker article about the evils of Saddam Hussein, including his ties to al Qaeda (that proved to be mythical) and ominous assessments of his WMD program (also mythical):

There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East.

There is no accountability in journalism. The invasion of Iraq has cost trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives — all to avoid nightmare scenarios that turned out to be imaginary. Eight years later, one of the primary purveyors of those nightmares is back with new nightmares, pushing a new war to avoid them. And a respectable publication like The Atlantic gives him their cover.

But the problem is not Goldberg, or all the other malpracticing journalists who justified the Iraq War with falsehoods and are still getting published. (Judith Miller had an article in the Wall Street Journal last Monday — about Iraq, no less.) Goldberg’s article is a move under the blanket. There will be more as the case for attacking Iran marches further into the mainstream. Where are these notions coming from, ultimately? Who knows?

But they will all push one Big Illusion: that war is the safe option. If we can’t figure out what else to do, we should go to war, because that always works. Articles and talking heads will pretend to examine the what-ifs, but they will take for granted that Iran can only respond in foreseeable ways, and will express confidence that we have those scenarios covered.

That’s not what happened in Iraq. None of the war-pushers’ crystal balls predicted a popular insurgency that we’d still be fighting seven years later. (Other crystal balls did show an insurgency. But the public didn’t hear those voices until it was too late.) But nothing is more typical of war: Push an enemy to the wall and he becomes desperate and clever. He thinks of new options that your think-tank experts didn’t consider.

War is not safe. No matter what cards you are holding or think that the other players are holding, war is a wild risk. We can’t let the propagandists fool us into forgetting that again.

Or maybe the next war won’t be televised. Sunday’s New York Times focused on

the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

When it works, it’s just the thing: Imagine if a robot drone had blown up Bin Laden’s inner circle while they were planning 9-11. The bad guys vanish and we aren’t left picking up the pieces of some country’s shattered government.

The NYT does a good job of outlining the problems too: Robot drones don’t develop relationships with the local population. So your intelligence is always second hand, and you blow up the wrong people sometimes. When you do, on-the-ground al Qaeda propagandists are there to take advantage.

And there’s a larger problem: The temptations of a secret murder machine are more than human virtue can handle. Even if it isn’t being abused now, someday it will be.

Fire, Flood, Drought

This summer we’ve seen record heat and drought in Russia ruin the wheat crop and lead to wildfires that filled Moscow with smoke. (It looked even worse from space.) We’ve seen record monsoons in Pakistan lead to floods, at least 1500 deaths so far, and  and massive public health problems. Greenland just lost a 100-square mile chunk of ice — the biggest in 50 years.

So is it the Apocalypse or global warming? Lester Brown is cautious about his claims, but says the Russia crop failure is exactly the kind of thing we should expect to see more of as the Earth heats up.

Are this record heat wave and the associated crop shortfall the result of climate change? Not necessarily. No single heat wave, however extreme, can be attributed to global warming. What we can say is that heat and drought similar to that experienced in Russia are projected to occur more frequently as the earth’s temperature continues to rise in the decades ahead. This Russian heat wave lets us see just how brutal future climate change can be.

He then connects these dots:

  • heat waves shrink harvests (about 10% for every degree degree Celsius or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)
  • every year the Earth has 80 million more mouths to feed
  • about 3 billion people (mostly in places like China and India) are taking advantage of economic growth to eat more meat, which ultimately requires more grain
  • around 30% of the U.S. grain harvest is producing ethanol fuel for cars

And concludes:

Surging annual growth in grain demand at a time when the earth is heating up, when climate events are becoming more extreme, and when water shortages are spreading makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to keep up. This situation underlines the urgency of cutting carbon emissions quickly–before climate change spins out of control.

Ditto for Pakistan and Greenland. These kinds of things could happen at random, but they’ll happen at random a lot more often as the climate gets hotter.

Short Notes

You could pleasantly spend hours rummaging through the L.A. Times photography site Framework. The Pictures in the News feature is always worthwhile. Want cute animals? We got cute animals. Meteors over Stonehenge? Something out of the archives? Something pastoral? Newsy? Artsy? Sporty?

Most places on the web, you have to sift through a lot of crap to find the really good stuff. Not here. It’s just one OMG shot after another until you decide to stop.

Glenn Beck wants to save your soul, and he’s getting increasing messianic about it.

Markos Moulitsas and I have the same assessment of Sarah Palin:

So watch, she’ll make noise about running for president in 2012, but when push comes to shove, she doesn’t have the work ethic to actually campaign. She’ll bask in the attention, sell lots of books, and get $100K per speech. But the second it becomes hard work, she’ll call it quits.

I predict a long attention-milking tease: a year or more of hints and winks, culminating in an announcement that she needs to protect her family from the vicious media, and besides she can do more good for the American people by tweeting 140-character policy treatises and giving $100K speeches to audiences who don’t get to ask questions.

Here’s a lesson in how propagandists can turn legitimate research to their own purposes. In a survey of French Muslims, 60% said they identified equally as French and as Muslim, 14% as primarily French, and 22% as primarily Muslim. The headline reporting this in Le Figaro described French Muslims as “well integrated”.

This got quoted by a Danish psychologist as “only 14% of the Muslim populations … see themselves as more French … than Muslim”, which supports his claim that “Integration of Muslims in western societies is not possible.”

And this Dane is then referenced by Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association who calls for “a halt to the immigration of Muslims into the U.S.” and repatriation of “Muslims who have already immigrated here … back to Muslim countries”.  He attributes this conclusion to “simple Judeo-Christian compassion”. After all, “Why force [American Muslims] to chafe against the freedom, liberty and civil rights we cherish in the West?”

Just for context, I’d like to see a survey of people who contribute to the American Family Association: Do they consider themselves primarily Christian, primarily American, or equally Christian and American?

Anderson Cooper has been debunking the “terror baby” fantasy of the extreme Right. (They think pregnant terrorist women will come here to have their babies, and that they will then take those babies home to raise as terrorists. In 20 years: a terrorist with U.S. citizenship!) He asks Rep. Gohmert if he has any evidence for his claims, lets Gohmert rant without cutting off his mike, but repeatedly points out that Gohmert has offered no evidence.

I’m sure Gohmert sees this as evidence of Cooper’s “left-wing bias”. But if someone claims the sky is green, there’s nothing biased about going outside, looking up, and reporting that the sky is still blue. That’s a reporter’s job.

I can’t remember the last time I agreed with something at National Review, but Josh Barro pulls together all the sensible points about the Ground Zero Mosque — including one I hadn’t thought about: In Manhattan, a 13-story building two blocks away is invisible (a point made even more graphically by this image). And then he explains the issue in terms conservatives ought to understand:

Part of supporting limited government is understanding that sometimes, things you don’t like will happen, and the government (especially the federal government) won’t do anything about it. Getting to do what you want comes at the price of other people getting to do what they want—including build mosques where you’d prefer they didn’t.

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr would have been a child if we’d tried him promptly. But after 8 years in Guantanamo we can try him as an adult.

In honor of the 90th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Gail Collins tells the story of Harry Burn, a 24-year-old state legislator who casts the decisive vote for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment after getting a note from his Mom.

Yes, you can run a car on sewage. VW has a methane-powered prototype it calls the Bio Bug, but I prefer Discovery’s name for it: the Dung Beetle.

Or, if you want to use human muscle rather than human waste, there’s this muscle/electric hybrid. Four “rowers” can get it going 60 mph on their own, or you can tap the battery. Or look at it this way: If it runs out of juice, you can still row your way home.

Portugal gets 45% of its electricity from renewable sources. It’s expensive, but it works.

The Conservapedia — the right-wing response to that leftist Wikipedia — says that Einstein’s theory of relativity is “heavily promoted by liberals”. But Conservapedia knows it must be false because it doesn’t allow for action-at-a-distance, as witnessed by John 4:46-54.

The Onion reports an everyday environmental disaster: A crude oil tanker safely reaches port. “In a matter of days, this oil may be refined into a lighter substance that, when burned as fuel in vehicles, homes, and businesses, will poison the earth’s atmosphere on a terrifying scale.”

The Onion News Network holds a talking-heads debate on whether Biblical theories of Armageddon should be taught in addition to global warming. “What’s so wrong,” the anchor asks “with kids being exposed to both views of how they’ll die?”

And Onion Sports Network discusses a football coach’s decision to retire from his family to spend more time with the team. OSN reports that after 41 years of family life the coach “felt that he had nothing left to prove as a husband and father.” The OSN expert then speculates on who will replace the coach as head of the household, with attention focusing on a neighbor, his wife’s high school boyfriend, and another former football coach.

If you ask anybody, they’ll tell you that government spending is way up under Obama, and the economy’s continuing weakness is proof that government spending doesn’t work as a stimulus.

Well, not exactly. Increased federal spending has mainly just compensated for decreased state and local spending. So net government spending isn’t way up, and now that the federal stimulus (which included major aid to the states) is ending, the overall amount of government spending in the economy is set to go down.

Conservatives will describe those losing their government jobs as “bureaucrats”, but most of them will be teachers, firemen, and police.

Paul Krugman makes the same point in a wonkier way.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

 

August 16, 2010 – 2:07 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Evolving Traditions

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. … The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction. For, as he is to answer for her misbehavior, the law thought it reasonable to entrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children.

–– Sir William Blackstone
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769)

In this week’s Sift:

  • Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional. The trial record may be as important as the ruling. If same-sex-marriage opponents think there’s so much “evidence” supporting their position, why didn’t they present any?
  • The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution. An easy-to-read new book explains how interpretations of the Constitution legitimately change with time.
  • Ground Zero Mosque, Part II. “Opposing” the mosque can mean two very different things, but not many mosque opponents are making the distinction clear.
  • Short Notes. What Fox thinks of the 14th Amendment. China takes on bold new infrastructure projects, while we let things fall apart. Superman saves a home in the real world. A suggestion for protesting the Tea Party. Civil disobedience in Arizona. And where you can hear me next Sunday.
Proposition 8 is Unconstitutional

Every few months, it seems, the saga of same-sex marriage in California takes another twist or turn. Since the voters passed Proposition 22 ten years ago, there have been votes by the legislature, vetoes by the governor, civil disobedience by the City of San Francisco, a second referendum passing a constitutional amendment, and countless trips up and down the state court system.

By May, 2009, things had gone as far as they could at the state level: The voters had passed Proposition 8, which wrote one-man-one-woman into the state constitution, and the California Supreme Court had recognized its validity (while still upholding the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to Prop 8).

At that point a liberal/conservative all-star team of lawyers decided to take the argument federal. Ted Olson and David Boies, who had been the opposing lawyers in Bush v. Gore, filed suit in federal court to have Prop 8 declared unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” and “due process of law” to everyone.

Wednesday they succeeded in their first step: Judge Vaughn Walker declared Prop 8 unconstitutional. (Judge Walker’s ruling is long, but easy to read.)

As I explained last month after the Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional, just about all same-sex-marriage decisions hang on the same question: Laws that treat one group of people differently from another have to pass the rational basis test, which asks whether the law is “rationally related to furthering a legitimate government interest”. Can a law banning same-sex marriage pass that test? What legitimate government interest is furthered by treating same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples?

This is why court decisions often come out differently than referenda: Voters don’t have to answer that question. As Judge Walker put it:

The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose.

The secular logic of Prop 8 hangs on some real-world questions about the institution of marriage, its effects on children, the nature of homosexuality, and so on. So Judge Walker held a trial to gather testimony on those issues.

Evidence-based knowledge vs. faith-based knowledge. Boies and Olson called a series of expert witnesses: historians to describe the long-term evolution in American marriage laws (allowing wives to own property, allowing interracial marriage, etc.) and the history of discrimination against homosexuals; demographers to compare same-sex couples to opposite-sex couples (they’re not that different); economists to assess the impact of Prop 8 on the City of San Francisco (negative) and on same-sex couples and their children (also negative); social scientists to assess the affects of social stigma on gays and lesbians (bad), the impact of seven years of same-sex marriage on family issues in Massachusetts (negligible), and how children raised by same-sex couples compare to those raised by opposite-sex couples (not much difference); psychologists to discuss whether therapy can change a person’s sexual orientation (it can’t) and whether same-sex couples receive the same psychological benefits from marriage as opposite-sex couples (they do), and so on.

In other words, every question a reasonable person would ask about the impact of Prop 8 was answered by a professor of some relevant subject with peer-reviewed publications in the field, who cited actual research on the topic.

The defenders of Prop 8 did nothing of the kind. (The name of the case is Perry v. Schwarzenegger, but although California officials like Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown were named in the suit, they wanted no part of defending Prop 8. So the job passed to the people who got Prop 8 on the ballot in the first place.) They announced a number of expert witnesses, but only called two of them to the stand — neither of whom was actually in expert in what he was testifying about, and one of whom, David Blankenhorn, doesn’t seem to be an expert in much of anything. (This section of Judge Walker’s opinion is a good primer on the legal definition of expert witness.) Rachel Maddow spent an entire segment of her show Wednesday making fun of Blankenhorn’s “expertise”.

WaPo’s Jonathan Capehart commented:

if I were the conservatives I would troop back into court — and sue the pro-Prop 8 attorneys for malpractice.

Here’s an example from Judge Walker’s decison:

At oral argument on proponents’ motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents’ counsel the assumption that “the state’s interest in marriage is procreative” and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Counsel replied that the inquiry was “not the legally relevant question,” but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”

The impression the trial leaves — and this may have political implications even if the ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court — is that the logic of banning same-sex marriage is all 30-second sound bites and won’t stand up to scrutiny. The Religious Right may claim that there is massive evidence ( James Dobson has claimed “more than ten thousand studies“) relating same-sex marriage to dire outcomes for society, but when they had a chance to present their evidence in court, they folded.

As David Boies said on Face the Nation (in response to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council):

It’s easy to sit around and … cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. … But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence, there weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. It’s easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court you can’t do that.

This case may affect the overall national discussion in the same way that the Dover intelligent design case did. After a court show-down in which one side has no real evidence to present, it’s hard for the media to go back to he-said-she-said coverage.

Marriage evolution. Testimony from the historians dismantled another standard talking point: That marriage has been one thing for thousands of years and now gay activists want to change it to something else.

To the extent that the phrase traditional marriage means anything at all, it refers to the kind of relationship this week’s Sift quote describes: domination of the wife by the husband. Through all of American history marriage has been slowly evolving away from that: allowing wives to own property; letting them sign contracts and accept employment without their husbands’ approval; protecting against domestic violence; recognizing marital rape; and so on.

As a result of that evolution, marriage laws no longer enforce separate gender roles. So the gender-specific titles of husband and wife no longer correspond to any legal rights or responsibilities not included in spouse.

Without that evolution — in the 18th-century world of Blackstone’s Commentaries — Prop 8 proponents would be right: Same-sex marriage makes no sense if the law requires a dominant male husband and a submissive female wife; two men or two women can’t do it.

But in marriage as it stands today (and how many people would really want to go back?) two men or two women can fulfill the legal roles of spouses as well as opposite-sex couples do. Laws that prevent them from doing so are relics of a system whose underlying logic was abandoned decades ago.

Impact. Ultimately this is headed for the Supreme Court, where (as Dahlia Lithwick explains) the case will be decided by Justice Kennedy, the Court’s swing vote.

If the Supreme Court reverses Judge Walker, the impact of would not be as great as some people seem to think. It would be harder for a future Supreme Court to find protection for same-sex marriage in the 14th amendment, but state legislatures could still recognize same-sex marriage and state courts could still find a same-sex couple’s right to marry in their state constitutions.

Rather than take on the evidence, most “family values” spokesmen attacked the judge: He’s gay. And all those professors of whatever who testified? They’re gay too. What more do you need to know?

While Boies does CBS, Olson is handling Fox.

Stephen Colbert sees Judge Walker’s decision as “Arma-gay-ddon“.

Humorist Andy Borowitz explains why most marriages are already gay:

“Soon after marrying, most men stop hitting on women and start shopping for furniture,” Dr. Logsdon said. “Scientifically speaking, how gay is that?”

I’m coming to like NYT’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat even though I seldom agree with him. He consistently offers something genuine to disagree about, and doesn’t just spout nonsense and make stuff up.

The Sift Bookshelf: The Living Constitution

The Living Constitution by David Strauss is the best popularization of constitutional law I have read. It is short (139 pages of 300-350 words each), readable, and well organized. Best of all, it does something important: debunks the theory of constitutional interpretation that you most commonly run across in the media (originalism) and provides an alternative that makes sense out of what the courts have been doing for the last 200-or-so years.

Let’s start with originalism. This theory says that the Founders had a definite idea in mind when they wrote each line of the Constitution, and that the role of a judge is to ascertain that idea and apply it to the case at hand. There are two problems with originalism: (1) it’s impossible to carry out; and (2) it violates Thomas Jefferson’s principle that the dead should not rule the living. (De-sound-biting that a little: The democratic principle of “the consent of the governed” doesn’t mean much if the consent was given once and for all in 1787.)

Strauss brings home the impossibility of knowing the Founders’ original intent by recalling what Americans went through in the 1970s around the Equal Rights Amendment. (The ERA was passed by Congress in 1972, but fell just short of ratification by 3/4 of the states, so it is not part of the Constitution now.)

If the ERA had passed, originalism would have future judges try to ascertain and apply what the people alive in the 1970s had “intended” by it. That’s laughable to anybody who lived through the 1970s, because to a very large extent we didn’t know. (I remember hearing long arguments about whether the ERA would force all bathrooms to be unisex.) Different people intended different things, and we couldn’t agree on what the ERA would mean even for the situations we could envision, much less situations that might arise in 200 years.

I know the founding generation was supposed to be full of giants, but were they really that much more self-aware than the Americans of 1972?

So, if we admit we can’t always find a well-defined meaning by recreating the mindset of 1787, how are we supposed follow the Constitution? Well, some things are obvious, like a president’s term lasting four years or senators needing to be 30 years old. But how “freedom of the press” applies to the Internet, or exactly what constitutes “abridging the freedom of speech” — now or in 1787 — requires some interpreting. How do we do it?

The defenders of originalism say that the only alternative is anarchy; the law will be whatever the current judge wants it to be, until he’s overruled by some other judge.

Strauss describes the alternative method of common law, a pre-constitutional process we inherit from England. Under common law, a judge considers how similar cases have been decided in the past. And if there’s still wiggle room, s/he resolves it by applying more abstract principles of justice, fairness, and common sense to the facts of the case at hand. For centuries, common law provided a workable legal system even in situations where there was no written law.

Strauss claims that this is in fact what our courts have been doing for the last two centuries: applying the text of the Constitution when it is clear (four-year presidential terms), consulting precedents to interpret provisions that are not clear (abridging freedom of speech), and attempting to resolve the remaining uncertainties with justice, fairness, and common sense.

A written constitution combined with a common-law method of interpretation produces a “living constitution” — one whose meaning evolves from generation to generation.

Strauss’ examples are the best part of the book. He devotes a chapter to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools. Half a century later, everybody likes the Brown decision. But it clearly violated originalism: Hardly anybody who voted for the 14th Amendment in 1868 thought they were voting for desegregation.

On the surface, Brown also violates common law, because it reverses a precedent rather than following it. The key precedent in this case isPlessy v. Ferguson, an 1896 decision saying that the 14th Amendment‘s promise of “the equal protection protection of the laws” can be satisfied by facilities that are “separate but equal”.

Looking deeper, though, Strauss shows that the 1954 Court was not just saying “Our moral values are better than the 1896 Court’s moral values.” He goes through a series of cases between 1896 and 1954 in which the Court tried to make separate-but-equal work. In case after case, it decided that the specific separate arrangements at hand (mostly concerning segregated law schools) were not equal. If you collected all those precedents, it became hard to imagine how to design racially separate facilities that the Court would consider equal.

So when the 1954 Court says that racially separate schools can’t be equal, it isn’t pulling that conclusion out of its own sensitive conscience. Instead, it’s amalgamating the conclusions of many specific cases decided since 1896, and coming up with an interpretive scheme that retroactively explains those decisions better than separate-but-equal did.

That’s how the common-law method works: You stick with an interpretation until the exceptions start to overwhelm the rule, and then you come up with a new interpretation that handles the exceptions better. It’s flexible enough to evolve through accumulated experience, but it’s not open to individual whim.

Ground Zero Mosque, Part II

Since I first wrote about the Ground Zero Mosque two weeks ago, more people and organizations have come out against it — bigots and right-wing extremists, of course, but also people who should know better like the Anti-Defamation League, John McCain, and the Wiesenthal Center.

Their statements all fudge an important issue: When you say you’re “against” the mosque, do you mean “I wish the people building it would reconsider” or do you mean “I want the government to stop them”? The first expresses sympathy for the people who feel insulted by the mosque; the second attacks religious freedom in America and sides with anti-Muslim bigots.

It’s important to be clear about this. Whenever a minority tries to exercise its rights, it’s going to be unpopular. In such a climate, announcing that you oppose their efforts is going to encourage bigotry, even if you claim that’s not your intention and even if you word your statement carefully. The headlines you generate are more important than your precise phrasing. The ADL should know that from its own experience battling anti-Semitism. (Some other Jewish groups have supported the mosque project.)

In response to the ADL’s statement, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria returned an award and honorarium the ADL gave him five years ago.

The poll showing that New Yorkers oppose the mosque fudges the same issue. The question asked was:

Do you support or oppose the proposal to build the Cordoba House, a 15 story Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan 2 blocks from the site of the World Trade Center?

I wonder if you could get the opposite result (“New Yorkers Support Mosque”) by asking Mayor Bloomberg’s question:

Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?

Short Notes

It’s striking how much of this Sift revolves around the 14th Amendment, or, as Fox & Friends calls it, “the anchor baby amendment.“

Here’s one way in which China has already replaced the United States as the leader of the world. A few decades ago, if you saw plans for some crazily futuristic public-works project, you knew it had to be in America. Now it has to be in China.

Check this out: Train-car-sized buses that use the same right-of-way as ordinary highways, but they sit up so high that cars drive under them. They’re like rolling overpasses. More artist-conception pictures here. Construction in Beijing is supposed to start later this year.

Meanwhile, our cities are turning off streetlights and breaking up roads because we’re not willing to pay taxes to maintain them.

In the real world, a family home facing foreclosure is not usually considered a job for Superman. Except this one time. A previously unexamined stack of old magazines in the basement turned out to include a copy of Superman’s debut comic, Action #1. It’s expected to bring $250,000 at auction.

Jesus’ General is normally a satirist, but he seems serious about this suggestion: Go to a September 12 Tea Party rally and burn a Confederate flag in protest.

The parts of Arizona’s immigration law that were not thrown out by the courts went into effect July 29. Resistance to the law has also begun.

If you happen to be near Bedford, Massachusetts around 10 a.m. next Sunday morning, come listen to me preach on “Spirituality and the Humanist” at First Parish Church.

 

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

August 9, 2010 – 11:08 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

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Severed from the People

The press-politics system that produces this kind of news is so inward-looking that it threatens to sever the government from the people.

— Lance Bennett, Regina Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails

In this week’s Sift:

  • Why WikiLeaks Isn’t Ending the War. A theory from a three-year-old book explains why the WikiLeaks story is more like the Downing Street Memo than the Pentagon Papers.
  • The End of (Military) History? Andrew Bacevich claims: “The Western way of war has run its course.” How close is he to being right?
  • The Oil Spill. The worst didn’t happen: The well is capped and the surface slick has mostly dissipated. Now the media pendulum may swing too far in the other direction and tell us the spill was never a big deal.
  • Race, Class, and Jim Webb. Senator Webb’s article “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege” is not nearly as bad as its headline.
  • Corporations 3, Humans 0. The impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision isn’t just theoretical any more. Corporate power may be reaching a tipping point.
  • Short Notes The NH primary would be a granite stumbling block for a Palin candidacy. Reagan’s budget director won’t drink the tax-cut kool-aid. Glenn Beck’s golden fleece.
Why WikiLeaks Isn’t Ending the War

This week’s mystery was something that didn’t happen: Why didn’t WikiLeaks’ release of 91,000 U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan (75,000 available to the public so far) start a firestorm that forces a major change in the conduct of that war, or maybe even a withdrawal?

The leak hit public awareness a week ago Sunday, with simultaneous articles in the New York Times, the London newspaper The Guardian, and Germany’s Der Spiegel, the three outlets WikiLeaks had given an advance look.

Wednesday, the House passed another Afghan war appropriation as if nothing had happened. By yesterday, Frank Rich was reassuring us that the Pentagon Papers hadn’t ended the Vietnam War singlehandedly either. He offered this weak consolation:

What Ellsberg’s leak did do was ratify the downward trend-line of the war’s narrative. The WikiLeaks legacy may echo that.

By this morning, the WikiLeaks story had all but vanished. The front page of the Times’ web site still had a link to a Sunday news story about Defense Secretary Gates’ claim that the leak damaged national security, but nothing about undermining support for the war. Even the liberal blog TPM wasn’t talking about it.

So what’s up with that?

By fortuitous coincidence, my Journalism Reading Project had uncovered a book that explained it: When the Press Fails by Bennet, Lawrence, and Livingston. It came out in 2007 and examined coverage of the Bush administration, from the Iraq build-up to Abu Ghraib to Hurricane Katrina. The mystery the authors were trying to solve is why

a press system dedicated to telling “both sides of the story” so often reported only one.

In the pre-war debate about Iraq we often heard only the administration’s side, even when its message was false. Abu Ghraib started out to be a this-changes-everything story, but before long the administration got control of it — changing the media’s terminology from torture to abuse and focusing on “a few bad apples” of low rank rather than the guilt at the top.

How did that happen, given that journalists themselves are likely to be liberals? The authors did a lot of quantitative analysis about the trajectory of major stories, and came up with this theory [italics theirs]:

what carries a story is not necessarily its truth or importance, but whether it is driven by dominant officials within institutional decision-making arenas such as executive policy circles, or legislative or judicial processes.

In other words, the press isn’t covering the issue, it’s covering the government’s decision-making process about the issue. If something important is revealed, the mainstream press will cover it — once, for the sake of the public record. But to keep a story on the front pages, some important player in the government — somebody powerful enough to change things — has to pick up the ball and run with it. So if Congress holds hearings, or if the courts get involved, or if there is a rift between factions in the administration, the press will cover it.

But if no official does anything, the story dies. No matter how important it is.

Right now, no powerful force is bucking the administration’s Afghanistan policy. Republicans are generally pro-war and Democrats are mostly pro-Obama. There’s an anti-war faction among Congressional Democrats (102 House Dems voted against the most recent appropriation), but they don’t control anything big enough to make news. So far, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the leaks that someone could take to court and hope to win.

So there it stands: The information is in the public record for those who really want to know, but it won’t be news again until somebody with power uses it to take action. If they ever do.

The best parallel here isn’t the Pentagon Papers, it’s the Downing Street Memo. Leaked in 2005, it proved that the Bush administration was set from Day One on an Iraq invasion and manipulated the public to support one.

It was dynamite, and it got covered — sort of. But Republicans held firm and the Democrats in Congress weren’t ready to make a big push to end the war. So the memo became part of the public record, but never part of a why-the-war-must-end narrative that competed seriously with the administration’s narrative.

When the Press Fails uses the terminology of frames, and puts it this way:

a productive frame contest exists in the news only when information independent of an administration is put on a par with information obtained from that administration, and when the media present a coherent counterperspective, not just bits and pieces of alternative perspectives.

That’s exactly what the mainstream media doesn’t believe it should be doing: starting a “frame contest” with the administration. They’ll throw the facts out there, but not pull them together into an alternative point of view and push it. That would be a role for a propagandist, not an “objective” journalist.

Unfortunately, When the Press Fails lacks perspective on a Democratic administration. The main thing to observe about coverage of Obama is that the conservative flagships — Fox News and the Washington Times — don’t play by the mainstream media rules. They have no scruple about keeping a story going on their own (see the New Black Panther Party story) or presenting a counterframe that isn’t supported by any powerful institution.

The End of (Military) History?

Andrew Bacevich (bio) posted a challenging article this week, The End of (Military) History? announcing that “the Western way of war has run its course.”

Like the book he takes his title from (Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History), Bacevich is overstating things, but he does have a case: Recent wars demonstrate the huge gap between what most Americans think war is supposed to accomplish and what it can actually do for us.

For most of human history, war was good business if you were good at it. You could sack other capitals and bring their treasures back home. You could ransom prisoners, sell conquered subjects into slavery, impose taxes on foreign cities, and so on. The Caesars built Rome on the profits of war.

That model started sputtering in the American Civil War and failed completely in World War I, which bankrupted even the winners. Why? Industrialization and modern communications made it possible to turn an entire population into a war machine. That was so expensive and so mutually destructive that the economics no longer made sense: If you won, you could claim a larger piece of the pie, but the pie had shrunk so much and cost so much to win that it wasn’t worth it.

Plus, modern wealth isn’t sackable. You can carry gold and slaves back home with you, but not an electrical grid or an educated work force. By some measures, South Korea has the world’s best internet system. But if Kim Jong-il conquered the South, all he could do is destroy that system. He couldn’t sack it and bring it home.

But even if they didn’t profit, winners still got to impose their will. America no longer has slavery because the North won the Civil War. Germany is democratic and France is not fascist (rather than the reverse) because the Allies won World War II.

But even that justification has been failing in most wars since Vietnam. We (and the Israelis, who are Bacevich’s second example) keep winning on the battlefield, but failing to impose our will. (Afghanistan is Exhibit A.) Military history is almost certainly not over, but we need to take a hard look at what’s going on, and lower our unreasonable expectations.

Here’s what I think war can do today:

  • Prevent somebody else from gaining an advantage by force. That’s the lesson of the First Gulf War: Saddam conquered Kuwait, we threw him out, and Kuwait more-or-less went back to normal.
  • Destroy things that need destroying. Israel’s air raid on Saddam’s nuclear reactor, for example. If Saddam had really had WMDs in 2003, and if our goal in invading Iraq had been to destroy them and leave, it could have worked.
  • Free prisoners or capture (or kill) people you want to bring to justice. We haven’t been able to pull off a capture of Bin Laden, for example, but at least that is within the realm of military possibility.
  • Finally, If you’re willing to go that far, genocide and ethnic cleansing still work. You can kill everybody, or drive out an indigenous population and repopulate the land with your own people. (That’s how ethnically European people like me came to be Americans in the first place.)

I think that’s a complete list. If what you want to do isn’t on it, or if you can’t get what you want by threatening one of those things, then you can’t do it with military force.

Where we’ve gotten in trouble, I believe, is that certain ways of imposing your will depend on the ultimate threat of genocide, which we are not willing to do. It’s like in the movies, where everyone has to do what you say because you’ve got the gun. In practice, it doesn’t work that way unless people believe you’re willing to kill them — and not even then, if they’re willing to die.

I think a lot of Americans still have that movie-gun expectation: We’ve got tanks in the streets and bombers in the air, so everyone has to do what we say. When they don’t, we have no next step.

Assuming (as I do) that genocide and ethnic cleansing are going to stay off our list of options, war is not that useful to us any more, except to deter other nations from going to war. There are a few additional situations where a raid might accomplish something worthwhile, but that’s about it.

That capability cost us $782 billion in fiscal 2009.

The Oil Spill

This week’s other surprise was that the BP oil spill is dissipating faster than most people expected. (Some sources are saying faster than anybody expected, but back in May this guy was predicting exactly what’s happening now. I wasn’t convinced, but I linked you to him in June because he looked honest and plausible.)

Naturally, the media pendulum is swinging back too far in the other direction: The oil spill is no big deal, Nature takes care of these things on its own, environmentalists tried to scare everybody about nothing, and so on.

Let’s get our bearings. One of the worst possibilities isn’t happening: A big oil slick won’t cover the surface for years to come, cutting off oxygen and turning some large chunk of the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone before spilling out into the Atlantic. Religious people should thank God and everyone else should be feeling some unfocused gratitude. It could have been a lot worse.

But that doesn’t mean everything is fine now. The slick has broken up into smaller particles, many of which have sunk to lower levels. But the oil is not gone, and neither is the chemical dispersant BP used in unprecedented quantities. Grist’s Brad Johnson explains.

Stephen Colbert knows what has happened to the oil. Noting that since the BP well has been capped, spills have appeared in Michigan and Louisiana, Colbert concludes: “The oil has achieved whack-a-mole technology.”

Race, Class, and Jim Webb

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia walked into a mine field by writing a column in the Wall Street Journal about race. It came at either a good or a bad time, depending on your point of view. For months, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media had been banging the drum about racism against whites, trumping up a series of baseless stories that culminated in the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.

Finally the Right had gone too far, and voices from the Left weren’t going to let them get away with it this time. Last week I pointed you to Rachel Maddow’s connect-the-dots reporting about Fox News attempt to stir fear that “black people are coming for you.” This week Joan Walsh picked up that message, naming it “the 50-state Southern Strategy” after Richard Nixon’s successful effort to turn white resentment into votes in the South.

So it was disheartening when, three days after the Sherrod resignation, Webb’s column appeared in the WSJ under the headline “Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege”. I like Webb, so I offer this excuse for him: The term white privilege doesn’t appear in his article, and I know from experience that editors (not writers) compose headlines. So Webb’s headline may have surprised him as much as anybody.

The left side of the blogosphere struck back hard. David Sirota (who has been a Webb fan in the past) wrote a column inducting him (and NYT columnist Ross Douhat, who made a similar point)  into “The Cult of White Victimhood“. Author Tim Wise pulled Webb’s article apart line-by-line in an article that drew 435 comments — with few Webb defenders — at Daily Kos.

Webb, though, is arguing something a little more nuanced than “black people are coming for you”. A major theme of Webb’s political career is class. In his book A Time to Fight he says:

Contrary to the bellicosity of the right-wing talk-show mavens, it is not class warfare or envy to point out that economic inequalities persist in our society. In fact, the reverse is true: It is class warfare from the top down to pretend that such inequalities don’t matter.

In the context of his career and its message, I don’t think Webb is saying that white privilege is a myth. I think he’s pointing out that White America has class divisions. And whenever there is a price to pay for racial justice, upper-class whites make sure that lower-class whites pay it. (This is one theme of Anthony Lukas’ Pulizer-winning book Common Ground about the desegregation of Boston public schools. Upper-class whites sent their children to private schools or moved to upscale suburbs unaffected by desegregation, leaving lower-class whites and blacks to hash out the problems.)

When Yale decides to admit fewer whites, the George W. Bushes don’t lose their place. Douhat references a study of admissions at elite colleges:

For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

This is a double-win for the white upper class: Not only do they avoid losing any of their own privileges, they turn lower-class whites and blacks against each other.

Webb wants to focus affirmative action programs more narrowly on the descendants of the victims of slavery and Jim Crow, rather than on everyone who isn’t white. And he hints that upper-class blacks don’t need help either. Presumably this would lessen the impact of affirmative action on lower-class whites.

I haven’t thought enough about that proposal to comment on it. (I’d rather see a direct assault on upper-class white privilege, with less lower-class collateral damage, but that may be politically impossible.) But I do think that Webb and Douhat are expressing part of the racial conversation we need to be having. While rejecting the outright propaganda Fox has been giving us, I think race is an issue where we need a little less purity-of-message and more listening to all honest opinions.

Corporations 3, Humans 0

In January, when the Supreme Court granted new first amendment rights to corporations, pro-human activists comforted themselves with two thoughts. The first said that corporations wouldn’t do much with their new rights, and the second said that it wouldn’t matter as long as we had good disclosure laws, so that people knew whose propaganda they were listening to.

Bad news on both counts: First, coal companies are going to use their newly granted rights to campaign for Kentucky Republicans in this year’s House and Senate races. Mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard says:

Between them, ICG and Massey have had 41 miners killed in just two disasters. It’s disturbing to see companies that don’t have strong safety records try to defeat politicians, like Ben Chandler, who have fought for stronger mine safety.

Second, a Republican filibuster in the Senate has blocked the DISCLOSE act, a bill to force corporations to identify themselves in political ads they buy.

Summing up: Through their Republican Party subsidiary, corporations already wield enough political power to insure that they can anonymously spend vast sums to acquire more political power. As Kent Brockman once famously announced, “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.”

Short Notes

It’s always satisfying when the hard data backs up your intuition: If Sarah Palin runs for president, she’ll have a problem here in the New Hampshire primary. A new poll of NH Republicans says Palin runs fifth with 9% of the vote.

David Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s budget director and ought to know a thing or two about conservative economics. In yesterday’s NYT, he wrote a stunning indictment of current Republican economic proposals — particularly extending Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy beyond their original expiration date:

Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

A graphic explanation of how Glenn Beck is helping a sponsor fleece his listeners. Short version: Get them worried that the currency is going to collapse, invent a conspiracy theory about how the government is going to confiscate gold bullion, and then personally vouch for a company that will sell them gold coins at a huge mark-up.

August 2, 2010 – 1:18 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Contractions

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Ground Zero Mosque. Mainstream opponents of the mosque rely on a lot of unstated assumptions. Uglier voices go ahead and state them.
  • If Republicans Take the House. Remember the Clinton years? That’s what they’ve got in mind.
  • Disinformation Watch. The Shirley Sherrod incident lowlighted a big week for disinformation, but there was some encouraging pushback.
  • Short Notes. June and climate change were both too hot for the Senate; Jane Austen’s Fight Club; Judge Napolitano says Bush should have been indicted; don’t take your gun to mass; Arizona shows what Tea Party principles are like in practice; Ohio’s giant Chia pet; more bogus trends; my news fantasy; and Top Secret America.
The Ground Zero Mosque

One tactic of polarization is for each side to trumpet the nastiest stuff on the other side — as if this kind of extremism is typical among your opponents, who all think this way when they’re not trying to present a reasonable public image.

And so an offensive YouTube video often gets more attention from its foes than its fans. That happened back in 2003 when MoveOn sponsored a “Bush in 30 Seconds” competition to make and upload your own anti-Bush video. Somebody uploaded an ad comparing Bush to Hitler, which MoveOn decided was offensive and took down — but not before conservatives had grabbed it and prominently displayed it on their own web sites as an example of MoveOn’s liberal extremism. (It’s still being used that way.) So the Bush/Hitler video has probably been viewed far more often by conservatives than by liberals.

I try to keep that example in mind while I sift the news, because my goal is to keep Sift readers well-informed, not just pissed off. So when I run across some example of right-wing hate or ignorance, I try to ask myself: How important is this? Is it an example of an attitude that is widespread and influential, or is it just a few crazies representing no one but themselves?

This long build-up is necessary because the debate over the proposed Cordoba House, a.k.a, the Ground Zero Mosque, has pulled a lot of the nasties out of their holes. The protests range from mainstream Republican leaders like Sarah Palin, who issued this joycean tweet:

Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate

to the lunatic fringe, who are virulently anti-Muslim. The question is how much attention those harsher voices deserve: Do they have an actual following? And is there a clear division between what they’re saying and what the mainstream voices are saying, or are they fleshing out what Palins and Gingrichs merely hint at?

In this case I’ve decided that the ugly voices do have a sizable following, and that often they are saying explicitly what the mainstream voices only imply.

The main idea behind all the anti-mosque activists — ire against a mosque visible from Ground Zero makes no sense otherwise — is collective guilt. Muslims blew up the World Trade Center in 2001 and now Muslims are building a mosque nearby. We are supposed to think of them as the same people. This ad, put out by the National Republican Trust (no direct connection to the Republican National Committee), makes it clear:

On September 11, they declared war against us. And to celebrate that murder of three thousand Americans, they want to build a monstrous 13-story mosque at Ground Zero.

Who? They.

This video, whose reasonable-sounding narrator is nobody famous, but whose message has been viewed more than 2 million times, takes it a step further. Muslims — even apparently secularized, Westernized American Muslims — are not just tainted with collective guilt, they are actually rooting for the downfall of the United States:

Those of you who know — personally — who know Muslims close enough to where they can tell you what they really think, you know this is actually quite common: Good citizens in public, not-so-good citizens in private. Interestingly, this dual Muslim nature is advocated in the Koran.

So if you think that Ali (who has lived next door or worked with you for years) is actually a good guy — think again. His religion tells him to be tricky. Secretly he was dancing for joy when the Twin Towers went down.

The second, related idea is that we’re not chasing down a conspiracy of international criminals, we’re at war with Islam itself — all 1.5 billion Muslims. Newt Gingrich, for example, blogged this:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

This only makes sense if you assume several incredible things.

  • The Christendom and Judaism are at war with Islam.
  • The United States plays a role in that war comparable to Saudi Arabia’s; churches and synagogues are “ours” while mosques are “theirs”.
  • Religious intolerance is a valuable tactic in that war, a source of strength.
  • We have handicapped ourselves by swearing off this tactic while our enemy uses it.

I don’t see how else to reach Gingrich’s remarkable conclusion that the United States ought to take Saudi Arabia as its model, basing our behavior on what they do. And it’s not just Newt. If you watch Fox News or read the comments on just about any online article about the Ground Zero mosque, you’ll find many people echoing his point: We ought to be intolerant because the Muslim countries are.

Mayor Bloomberg has the right answer:

I think our young men and women overseas are fighting for exactly this. For the right of people to practice their religion and for government to not pick and choose which religions they support, which religions they don’t.

To which I would add this: We respect religious freedom not as part of some deal with the rest of the world, but because that is the American way. We see it as a source of strength, not weakness, and we’ll do it whether anybody else does or not.

The Founders would be horrified at the idea that we might give up on religious freedom because some other country doesn’t practice it. At the time they were writing that principle into the First Amendment, no other country was practicing it.

Juan Cole gives this example:

Ben Franklin … wrote in his Autobiography concerning a non-denominational place of public preaching he helped found “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

I wondered whether there were any English-speaking Christian churches in Hiroshima. Yes, there are.

Ground Zero is just the tip of an iceberg. New mosques are being protested all over the country.

If Republicans Take the House

What can we expect if the Republicans take control of the House? We got some indications this week that they want to do what they did during the Clinton administration: investigate everything until they can find an excuse to impeach the president. Thursday, Michelle Bachman told the GOP Youth Convention: “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

Impeach Obama. The same day the flagship conservative newspaper, the Washington Times, had not one but two editorials (by Jeffrey Kuhner and Tom Tancredo) demanding President Obama’s impeachment. Each editorial is long on rhetoric, but the specific high crimes and misdemeanors to be prosecuted are hard to decipher.

Tancredo says Obama is “an enemy of our Constitution” who “does not feel constrained by the rule of law”. He objects to the Obama Justice Department giving the “weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act”, the auto bailout, the off-shore drilling moratorium, “his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it”, and large deficits — without saying what specific laws these policies might violate.

Obama’s “most egregious and brazen betrayal of our Constitution” is his immigration policy, which Tancredo says violates his constitutional responsibility under Article IV “to protect states from foreign invasion”. So Tancredo’s impeachment case seems to rest on interpreting the “invasion” metaphor literally.

Kuhner accuses Obama of “erecting a socialist dictatorship”.

We are not there – yet. But he is putting America on that dangerous path. He is undermining our constitutional system of checks and balances; subverting democratic procedures and the rule of law; presiding over a corrupt, gangster regime; and assaulting the very pillars of traditional capitalism.

The specific policies Kuhner mentions are mostly acts of Congress like health-care reform (which he claims funds abortions), that could be thrown out by the courts if they are actually unconstitutional. (But they won’t be, so impeachment is necessary.) Comprehensive immigration reform will make 12-20 million new citizens — “shock troops for his socialist takeover”. The administration is not just a “gangster regime” but also a “fledgling thug state”. Kuhner closes with what sounds to me more like a call for assassination than impeachment: “The usurper must fall.”

So far Congressional Republicans have not shown any inclination to resist the wilder ideas that come from the Right. Will they resist this one if they get the power to pursue it? I’m not optimistic. A Republican House will take as an axiom that Obama should be impeached; they’ll search until they can find an excuse.

Repeal everything. High-ranking Republicans have pushed repeal of health care reform and Wall Street reform. They can’t actually do either, of course, without 60 votes in the Senate and enough popularity to intimidate an Obama veto. But what they could do is refuse to fund implementation.

Return to Bush policies. The basic Republican ideas are still to cut rich people’s taxes, let corporations regulate themselves, and stand behind Big Oil.

Will they? The Intrade Prediction Market is giving Republicans a 55% chance of taking the House, which seems high to me. But it all hangs on this bit of framing: If the 2010 elections becomes a referendum on whether or not people are happy, with voting Republican as the way to register unhappiness, the Republicans will win. If it becomes a contest between the Democratic vision of the future and the Republican vision, the Democrats will win.

The reason I think 55% is high is that most voters still do not know who their candidates will be and what positions they will take. So polls are still mostly an am-I-happy-with-things measure. As we get closer to election day, I expect more voters to compare candidates’ visions.

The model here is the Nevada Senate race. A few months ago, when that race was just about Harry Reid and his responsibility for how things are, Nevadans wanted him out. Now that he has an opponent — Tea Party extremist Sharon Angle — he has forged into the lead.

Disinformation Watch

This week had a major disinformation story: the Shirley Sherrod incident. Tuesday, Rachel Maddow did a good job of covering the collapse of the original Obama-official-is-racist spin, and then she did an even better job Wednesday of connecting the dots:

What is the same about the four Fox-News-initiated “scandals”: Van Jones, ACORN, the New Black Panther Party, and Shirley Sherrod? What’s the same about these four stories?

This isn’t about racism, this is not a story about picking on black people. This is a story about political outcomes, the tried and true political strategy of not targeting black people, but targeting white people. white voters, or white would-be voters to feel afraid of black people. To feel afraid of African-American people as if they’re not fellow Americans, but rather a threat to what white people have.

This tactic goes way back. Maddow traces it to George Wallace and the segregationists, but she could walked it back to the early days of the labor movement, when hard-working people who wanted a living wage and a safe workplace were painted as dangerous communist revolutionaries.

You can’t rally your side by standing for inequality, for keeping other people down. If you want to oppose equality, you have to pretend that you’re the ones in danger. That’s what Fox is pitching to whites: telling them over and over again that black people threaten them, and proving that point by making up facts as necessary.

Andrew Breitbart, the well-connected conservative blogger who promoted the doctored Sherrod video (and the doctored ACORN videos before it) has a defense: His dishonest smear wasn’t aimed at Sherrod, it was aimed the NAACP in order to discredit their criticism of racism in the Tea Party.  I’m glad he cleared that up. (And BTW, what he’s saying about the NAACP is also false.)

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum comments on the Right’s unwillingness to police itself:

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.

Frum blames this on the “closing of the conservative mind” — an unwillingness to face difficult facts. But Digby has another explanation:

this phenomenon is clearly less a matter of narrow-mindedness and ignoring of unwelcome fact than a conscious decision to lie for political ends. The [conservative] rank and file are misinformed because they are being purposefully led astray by the same conservative intelligentsia which owns and operates the right wing media.

The other big current disinformation story is Journolist. Journolist was a private email discussion list with (according to Wikipedia) “400 journalists, academics and others, all with political views ranging from centrist to center-left to leftist.”

The list was set up to be private, but sensationalized excerpts are being released on Tucker Carlson’s conservative blog The Daily Caller by Jonathan Strong. (Latest one here.) On the Right, this is seen as evidence of the great left-wing media conspiracy that they have always known existed.

That story has a few holes. First, this is like Climategate: a large collection of private emails excerpted to make the writers look bad. But unlike Climategate, the full collection is not available to the public. So when Strong mixes quotes with paraphrases (often the quote is only damning in the context of the paraphrase) we can’t check whether the paraphrase is fair.

(This, BTW, is an important point to remember in any scandal story: Can you check the source material, and if not, why not? Who is controlling your access and what is their motive?)

Second, the Daily Caller headlines exaggerate. Salon observes:

Today’s Caller headline — “Liberal Journalists Suggest Government Shut Down Fox News” — is objectively untrue. Simply reading the e-mails quoted in the story show that a non-journalist asked an academic question — whether the FCC had the authority to shut down Fox — and was quickly shot down by the journalists involved in the discussion.

Finally, the Caller’s stories rely on the reader’s imagination to connect the dots. A real expose’ would start with a Journolist comment and show how it led to some particular biased news coverage by the commenter or his/her organization.

Without such dot-connecting, even the cherry-picked excerpts sound like beleaguered liberal academics and opinion journalists (not reporters) trying to catch up to the better-organized conservative spin machine. They only seem sinister if you already know in your gut that biased coverage elected Obama.

Elena Kagan has not been “promoting the injustice of Shariah law” — or wearing a turban.

Lower taxes don’t lead to more revenue, as this simple graph shows. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell defines his own reality:

there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.

Rachel Maddow shows numerous Republican politicians making this tax-cuts-pay-for-themselves point and numerous conservative economists denying it. It’s exactly what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics”.

Only sleight-of-hand allows Republicans to claim that President Obama has “quadrupled the deficit“. They are comparing the current deficit to the 2008 deficit of $459 billion. But the government’s fiscal year begins in October, so the 2009 budget was actually made under President Bush, not Obama. Bush’s last budget projected a $1 trillion deficit, which (due to the recession being worse than expected) had increased to $1.2 trillion by the time Obama took office.

Short Notes

As the Senate gives up on even a very stripped-down climate-change bill, we discover that last month was the hottest June ever recorded.

The fake movie trailer is getting to be an art form of its own, and they don’t get much better than Jane Austen’s Fight Club..

Talk about straying from the reservation: Former judge and frequent Fox News guest Andrew Napolitano recently said on C-SPAN that Bush and Cheney “absolutely should have been indicted. For torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrants.”

Because one body is enough and more blood is not necessary, Louisiana Catholics won’t be taking advantage of their new right to carry concealed weapons during mass.

Harper’s puts its articles behind a subscription wall, so you read the whole thing online, but “Tea party in the Sonora” is incredible. It describes the sad result of the low-tax, low-regulation, and nativist principles (i.e. Tea Party principles) that have guided Arizona’s legislature for several years now.

Here’s the detail that paints the whole picture: Arizona doesn’t own its own state capitol. They did a sale-and-leaseback arrangement in January to raise cash for the current budget.

Now, why didn’t I already know that? Back in September The Daily Show did a great piece about putting the capitol building on the market. “What happens next year?” Jason Jones asks a state senator. “You’re killing me here,” she answers..

Instead of a concrete noise wall, Ohio is constructing the world’s largest Chia pet.

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on Jack Shafer and the ever-increasing number of bogus trends.

To illustrate the point that non-Americans have almost as much to lose from the decay of the American press as we do, I wrote a fake news story in which foreign governments bail out American journalism. “If the American people continue to be so misinformed,” says my fake Swede, “they’re just going to keep screwing up the world.”

More people should be reading/viewing the Washington Post series Top Secret America.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com.

July 26, 2010 – 12:22 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Powers That Ought To Be

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.

—Sydney J. Harris

In this week’s Sift:

  • My Journalism Reading Project: a work in progress. In a democracy, the People are supposed to be sovereign and the news media is supposed to be their intelligence agency. I’m trying to figure out why it’s not working that way.
  • What’s Really Wrong With America: Too Many Free Books. When I think about government waste, I don’t usually think about libraries. But some people do. And other people wonder whether facts make any difference.
  • Respectable, Sensible Bigotry. Accusations against Mel Gibson and the Tea Party are not just political correctness run wild.
  • Disinformation Watch. It’s a shame that anybody has to waste time keeping track of the made-up stories in the news, but somebody does.
  • Short Notes. The Times is still keeping an eye on Palestine. The Palins do soap opera way better than the Clintons. And Nate Silver graphs same-sex marriage.
My Journalism Reading Project: a work in progress

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re the sovereign of your own little country. You’re queen or generalissimo or president-for-life or something. If you wanted to do your job well, how much would you want to know about your country?

Silly question, right? You’d want to know everything you could. To the extent that your administration could afford them, you’d want to have agents of all sorts bringing you information: people who kept track of all your government’s projects and how they were progressing, who kept you up-to-date on the business climate, who monitored the health and safety of your citizens, and so on. You’d also want experts compiling statistics and noticing trends so that you could stay ahead of events. Outside your borders, you’d want agents keeping track of all the foreign countries that affected your homeland — trade partners, allies, threats, rivals.

And what would happen if you didn’t have that information? People who did would manipulate you into serving their interests rather than yours or your country’s. You’d sign things you didn’t understand. You’d empower underlings to go off and do God-knows-what. Even when you thought you were deciding things, you wouldn’t be; someone else would have laid it all out for you so that you really only had one choice.

Well, guess what? You are a sovereign. That’s what democracy is supposed to mean: the people are sovereign; they rule. You rule.

And there is an army of agents out there bringing you information. That’s what the news media is supposed to be: your intelligence agency. They’re supposed to be gathering the information you need to rule, figuring out what it all means, and presenting it to you in a way that you can absorb and use. And when they don’t, you and your country are at the mercy of whoever does have the information.

And so You the People, We the People, find ourselves going to war for reasons that turn out to be false, or being stampeded into covering the multi-billion-dollar losses of dishonest investment banks. When we try to do something in our own interests, like guaranteeing each other’s access to health care or heading off global warming, it’s incredibly difficult because of all the disinformation we have to wade through — death panels, Climategate, and much, much more.

So our intelligence agency has been letting us down. And things are getting worse: news agencies are closing bureaus and laying off reporters to save money. Can you picture any other sovereign allowing that? After 9-11, when it looked like the CIA and FBI had fallen down on the job, did the U.S. government respond by slashing their budgets and firing a bunch of agents? No, quite the opposite.

In many ways this is a big, complicated topic, but this much of it is simple: We the People haven’t been taking our sovereignty seriously. And we’ve tolerated both our government and the media corporations not taking it seriously either. We haven’t demanded the high-quality information that we need to do our jobs.

Scads of books have been written in the last few years about the sorry state and poor prospects of American journalism, and lately I’ve given myself the project of trying to read them. I’ll be telling you what I learn in dribs and drabs rather than saving it all for one big report.

Here’s one thing I’ve picked up already: Chapter 3 of McChesney and Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism contains some American history I had never run across before: Apparently the Founders really did take the sovereignty of the people seriously, and did consider the press to be the People’s intelligence agency.

That wasn’t just pious rhetoric. They spent serious money to subsidize that era’s equivalent of the Internet: the Post Office. Under the early presidents, America built the best postal service in the world, and had one of the highest literacy rates. That wasn’t just the result of our rugged individualism or our protestant desire to read the Bible for ourselves; it was social policy. Because, as Jefferson put it:

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

In particular, the federally-funded Post Office charged practically nothing for shipping newspapers and pamphlets, and the debate among the Founders was whether it should charge anything at all. At the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Rush said:

It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters to convey newspapers free of all charge for postage. They are not only the vehicles of knowledge and intelligence, but the sentinels of the liberties of our country.

Today we hear a lot from the Tea Party about the Founders and the Constitution and how “freedom isn’t free” — which always means that we have  to fight a war somewhere. To the real Founders, though, freedom wasn’t a strong military (quite the opposite) but an educated public with access to high-quality information.

And that brings us to the next story.

What’s Really Wrong With America: Too Many Free Books

Like a lot of states, Illinois and its cities have budget problems. And Fox Chicago has spotted a fat pile of government waste: public libraries.

There are 799 public libraries in Illinois. And they’re busy. People borrow more than 88 million times a year.

But keeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.

That’s money that could go elsewhere – like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions.

But why spend more money on education when the schools could eliminate their own wasteful shelves of books? Bob Herbert quotes the AP:

As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.

And he comments:

What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.

Could anything be more unfaithful to the vision of the Founders or the sovereignty of the People? (See previous article.) All our discussions about the value of education for the individual miss the point. If we were a monarchy, we would spare no expense educating the Crown Prince, and consider ourselves fortunate if he showed any interest in our efforts.

In a democracy, the children collectively are the Crown Prince. We are educating the future sovereign — not for his or her benefit, but for ours. Far more than sending troops to distant corners of the world, educating American children to wield their future sovereignty wisely is the cost of freedom. We should pay it, even in hard times.

Now let’s talk about libraries. A lot of Americans don’t really need libraries any more. If we’re rich, we can buy all the books we want. If we’re middle-class, we can afford a broadband internet connection. Probably our homes have at least one quiet room where we or our children can think and study.

But if you’re poor, or just struggling, you may not have any of that. Lots of children are growing up in homes without books, without the internet, and without quiet places to do their homework. They may or may not use the library for those purposes — that’s up to them and their parents. But as long as the library is open, the door to our culture is not completely closed.

What’s that worth to you? What’s that worth to our country?

While we’re talking about education and democracy, it’s worth looking at an article in the Boston Globe from last week:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds.

They studied popular political falsehoods (like “we found WMDs in Iraq”) and whether people who believe them change their opinion when given the facts. For the most part they don’t, and many people just dig in deeper, believing even more strongly after someone has tried to correct them.

I’ll quibble with the idea that this is a “recent” discovery. My journalism reading project includes Walter Lippmann’s 1921 classic Public Opinion:

The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public opinion is primarily a moralized and codified version of the facts. I am arguing that the pattern of stereotypes at the center of our codes largely determines what group of facts we shall see, and in what light we shall see them

When I think about how majority stereotypes of women, blacks, and gays/lesbians has changed since my childhood in the 1960s, though, I despair less about democracy than the Globe does. Stereotypes change, but only when people are confronted with new facts again and again, over a period of years.

Democracy works, but it works slowly, and only if lots of people are willing to insist on the truth day-in, day-out, while talking to their friends and co-workers over coffee.

Which brings us to the next story.

Respectable, Sensible Bigotry

Ever notice how often somebody portrayed as an innocent victim of political correctness turns out later to have been a flaming bigot all along?

Frank Rich connects the Mel Gibson dots. Critics who found Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” anti-Semitic were themselves tarred as anti-Christian bigots — until Mel got drunk and started ranting to police about “the f**king Jews”. More recently, tapes of Mel’s verbally abusive remarks to his girl friend have come out, laced with the N-word and other slurs.

That poor guy, victimized by those over-sensitive Jews and their baseless charges.

This week, it’s the Tea Party. The NAACP passed a resolution asking the Tea Party to “repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches”.

So of course recent Tea Party Express VP Mark Williams was all over the airwaves telling us who the real racists are: the NAACP, making their hateful charges against the fine upstanding white people of the Tea Party. Centrists and even some liberal pundits were taking a head-shaking why-did-you-have-to-start-this attitude towards the NAACP.

Then Williams overplayed his hand: He posted a parody letter from the NAACP president to President Lincoln asking to have slavery back:

We had a great gig.  Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house.  Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Yeah, that’s not racist. It’s — you know — funny. Right? And so was the suggestion that the NAACP finds tax cuts racist because …

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?

Hilarious. Where does that humorless NAACP get off implying folks like this are racists?

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates wrap up:

Racism tends to attract attention when it’s flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry

His point: We can’t let that grade-school “I’m not but you are” taunt intimidate us away from pointing out bigotry wherever it shows up.

Immigration Economics

Do illegal immigrants help or hurt the U.S. economy? Arguments both ways sound very convincing, but have a lot of holes. I haven’t yet found an analysis I can endorse wholeheartedly.

A report put out by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that illegal immigrants get a net government subsidy (benefits minus taxes) of $113 billion a year. But if you crunch some numbers in the report itself, you find that $38 billion of that goes to educating the American-citizen children of the immigrants. Thats us investing in our citizens’ future, not a “benefit” to illegal immigrants. I’ve got to wonder how many similar factors inflate the numbers.

A report by the Perryman Group estimated that making undocumented workers suddenly vanish (as in the movie A Day Without a Mexican) would lower GDP by $245 billion a year. However, its assumptions about the labor shortage in the native-born population are a lot less convincing now than they were when the report was published two years ago.

Since I can’t find or generate any trustworthy economic analysis, I’ll have to settle for a more anecdotal understanding.

One of the main characters in Nick Redding’s nonfiction book Methlandis Roland Jarvis, a native-born white American who starts out working in a meat-packing plant in Iowa, making $18 an hour with benefits. Over several years, the plant gets sold and resold, with each new owner slashing jobs and cutting wages (under the threat of closing the plant or moving it to Mexico), until workers make $6.50 an hour with no benefits. Jarvis tries to keep up his lifestyle by working extra hours (and smoking meth for extra energy), but eventually he gives that up to cook and deal meth full time.

A bunch of the people who take the low-wage no-benefit meat-packing jobs are illegal immigrants with some kind of phony paperwork. They do a hard, dirty and sometimes dangerous job that used to pay enough for an American worker to support a family and also pull his or her weight in the larger community through taxes. Now it doesn’t, so the plant workers (legal and illegal alike) are generating the kinds of costs the FAIR report tabulated: Their emergency-room visits and their kids’ education cost government more than their taxes cover. In essence, the workers are subsidized.

But who’s getting really getting that subsidy? Looking at the work and lifestyle of the immigrants, I don’t think it’s them. They earn what they get, and probably more.

Here’s what I see happening: The company pays its workers less than a living wage, and the government makes up the difference. To the extent that the meat-packing industry is competitive and efficient — not all industries are — the cost-reduction gets passed on to the consumer as lower meat prices. The rest is profit.

I think that’s typical. Whether we’re talking about cheap factory work, cheap child-care in our homes, cheap kitchen workers in our restaurants, cheap janitors in office buildings — the presence of illegal immigrants drives down costs. Some of that shows up in increased business profits and some in a lower cost-of-living for the rest of us. But it costs the government money.

It also costs unskilled American workers by driving down their wages — though it’s hard to tell how many of those jobs would just vanish overseas (maybe to be done by the same people who come here to do them now) if wages were higher.

Summing up: The subsidy FAIR noticed is just the visible piece of a larger social/economic policy decision to have a low-price low-wage economy. If we had an economy that respected hard work — one that paid workers a wage that allowed them to support both their families and the larger community — the subsidy would go away. But things would cost more.

In the absence of reliable numbers, I’ll just give my gut impression: I think middle and upper-class Americans do well out of illegal immigration, the working class not so well.

Disinformation Watch

Most people don’t want health care reform repealed.

Illegal votes by felons did not give Al Franken his seat in the Senate.

The “scandal” about the Justice Department “protecting” the fringy New Black Panther Party is completely trumped up. Newsweek concludes:

it’s not about a real investigation; it’s about staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration.

New British and Dutch reports say the same thing as every other official investigation: The only scandal in Climategate was stealing the researchers’ emails. Unfortunately, they can’t get the front-page coverage that the bogus stories got.

And finally, I’m not sure how you debunk something this nutty: A Republican Congressional candidate in Missouri claims Obama and the Democrats are taking away “the freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.” Don’t look at me — I said at the time that deporting the Holy Spirit was a bad idea.

Short Notes

Follow-up to last week: The NYT has yet another Israel/Palestine article with no precipitating event. Like the Kristof column I quoted last week, these reporters see the blockade failing to undermine Hamas:

Today Hamas has no rival here. It runs the schools, hospitals, courts, security services and — through smuggler tunnels from Egypt — the economy.

The best soap operas always find some way to stay fresh. Unwed pregnancy, break-up, acrimony, drug charges, nude photos — and now the Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston wedding is back on.

Meanwhile, those family-values-destroying Clintons are having a wedding of their own: Former first-daughter Chelsea is getting married at age 30. There’s no baby. She’s just marrying a guy she’s known since her teens, after getting her bachelors from Stanford and a masters from Oxford. Dull, dull, dull.

An illuminating graph from Nate Silver:

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July 19, 2010 – 12:34 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)