Crimes Uncovered

We must make atonement for all the terrible crimes we read of in the newspapers. We must make atonement for the still worse ones, which we do not read about in the papers.

— Albert Schweitzer

In this week’s Sift:

Tortured Coverage: Two Problems in 21st Century News

Two recent stories about torture expose different aspects of what’s wrong with American journalism.

In the first, a study by students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government demonstrated that major newspapers’ characterization of waterboarding abruptly changed in 2004, when it came out that the U.S. government was doing it. Prior to public knowledge of American involvement, 44 out of 54 New York Times stories that mentioned waterboarding characterized it as torture, but only 2 out of 143 subsequent articles did. The LA Times was also studied and its numbers showed a similar pattern.

The raw numbers are bad enough, but then you get to the NYT’s self-justification:

As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture. When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves.

Translation: The Bush administration told us not to call it torture, so we stopped. Similarly the Washington Post:

After the use of the term ‘torture’ became contentious, we decided that we wouldn’t use it in our voice to describe waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

What’s wrong here? Waterboarding-as-torture didn’t become “contentious” because some new information threw previous judgments into doubt. It became contentious because an interested party — the U.S. government — started contending against it in defiance of all previous objective standards.

And the major newspapers buckled. By backing off of a word the government didn’t want them to use, reversing their previous judgments about its meaning and proper use, they did take a side in the political dispute. I’ll let Glenn Greenwald sum up:

We don’t need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

The second story is also about torture, but on a much smaller scale: A former Chicago police lieutenant was just convicted of torturing sometimes-false confessions out of suspects, some of whom have subsequently been released from death row and won a suit against the city. The case came out of a series of articles investigative reporter John Conroy wrote for the Chicago Reader, starting in 1990.

Chicago public radio station WBEZ lucked out in its coverage of the trial: Conroy was available to blog about it because he’s unemployed. Like most big-city papers, the Reader has been laying off reporters — obviously not just the deadwood.

So who’s going to catch the next torturing cop? And who’s going to look into the stories of the people who are still in jail based on their tortured confessions? Not Conroy — now that the trial’s over, he needs to go find a job.

Immigration Reform: Comprehensive or Cartoon?

The Obama administration did two things to push the immigration issue forward in the past two weeks: President Obama gave a speech outlining what immigration reform ought to look like, and the Justice Department filed suit to keep Arizona from enforcing its papers-please law, S.B. 1070. [text of federal complaint. text of 1070]

The course of the immigration debate boils down to this: The problem is simple to describe, and there’s a simple-minded solution that feels satisfying but is cartoonishly unrealistic. Nobody wants to hear complicated answers this year, so every discussion founders on why we can’t just do the cartoonish thing.

WileECoyote.jpg

Here’s the simple problem: Millions — nobody’s sure exactly how many millions — of people came to this country illegally and live here either under false identities or off the books entirely. This has both good and bad effects on our economy (which I’ll discuss next week). It creates a big hole in our homeland security (because malevolent foreigners might hide in the crowd of harmless people who sneak into the U.S. and live here illegally). And it undermines our worker-protection and public-health laws (because undocumented workers won’t complain to the authorities, and who knows whether their children get vaccinations).

The simple-minded solution is that you build a wall at the border, then pick up the millions of illegal immigrants and dump them on the other side. Patrol the wall with enough troops to shoot anybody who tries to come back. Done.

As soon as you start adding details to that picture, though, the whole thing falls apart. For instance: If a wall will solve the problem, then why is there an illegal Chinese immigrant problem in Israel? They didn’t walk there.

We want foreigners to come here as tourists, students, and on business of various sorts. And we want to be the kind of open society where the government doesn’t keep track of our every move and force us to keep proving that we’re legal. So unless we’re willing to assign Soviet-style minders to every foreign family that goes to Disney World, we’re going to have illegal immigrants.

Now start imagining the Gestapo you’d need to round up millions of people, many of whom have been here for years and have friends and relatives who are legal residents with attics and basements. At a bare minimum, you’d need national ID cards, surprise house-to-house searches, and big penalties for those giving shelter. Where does that go? Years from now, high school students in Germany might be reading the tragic diary of some teen-age Anna Francisco from Indianapolis.

So if you think about the issue for more than a minute or two, you begin to see that we can’t solve this problem unless the vast majority of our undocumented residents cooperate. We can track down some of them, but we’ll need most them to come in voluntarily and register. And that means that our program has to have more carrots than sticks.

Conservatives hate that, because their instinctive reaction to any problem is to punish some non-wealthy person who doesn’t resemble them. But no punishment-based program can solve this problem.

We need what President Obama (and President Bush before him) described: a comprehensive plan that tightens the border, cracks down on employers, and offers undocumented residents legal status if they jump through a series of hoops. Such a program won’t bring the undocumented population down to zero — nothing short of ethnic cleansing will. But it should cut the problem down a few sizes.

Unfortunately, you have to get past the Wile E. Coyote solutions before you can even talk about anything realistic. And even Republican senators who know better aren’t willing to stand up to their radical base.

The federal suit against Arizona has a simple point: Regulating immigration is a federal responsibility, and the federal government needs to have the discretion to handle it. For example, it’s federal policy not to deport refugees who come here fleeing oppression. The Arizona law has no provision for that.

The best place I’ve found for studying the immigration issue is the Immigration Policy Center.

Obama’s immigration enforcement techniques are less showy and more effective than Bush’s.

The NYT has a fascinating article about the long-term unemployed. On the third page we find this:

“I would take a gardening job,” said a 58-year-old woman who had earned $24 an hour as an office manager. “I would clean toilets if I could, but I can’t take that job. Millions of people in California are illegal and they’re taking our jobs.”

A long list of factors went into explaining what had happened to the American economy so that former professionals conversant in spreadsheets and mutual funds were now chagrined to be denied the opportunity to scrub toilets. To a student of macroeconomics, the arrival of illegal immigrants seemed far down the list, somewhere after weak long-term job growth and the near collapse of the financial system.

But to unemployed people trying to divine a cause through the miasmatic haze of their own situations, the presence of illegal immigrants was the explanation they could see most clearly. You could spot them on street corners, waiting for work. You could see them crammed into rental homes, or hear their music blaring from pickup trucks. Joblessness was disorienting. Illegal immigrants formed the only putative cause that lived next door.

DOMA is Unconstitutional

Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that a big chunk of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional.

The case. It’s easy for the facts of a case like this to get lost in the subsequent debate, so I’ll state them up front: Seven same-sex couples who are legally married in Massachusetts applied for federal benefits that opposite-sex married couples routinely get (like family health insurance for federal employees), but they were denied because of DOMA. Three surviving same-sex spouses applied for federal survivor benefits under Social Security and were also denied.

Judge Joseph Tauro ruled that they should get their benefits (with one exception on a technicality). From here the case will almost certainly go to an appellate court and then to the Supreme Court before it is finally resolved.

DOMA. Congress passed DOMA in 1996, shortly after a case in Hawaii raised the possibility that same-sex marriage might become legal in that state. (It still hasn’t happened. Hawaii’s governor vetoed a same-sex civil-union law Tuesday. Same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004 and is now also legal in Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia. Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Wikipedia has the details.)

DOMA says two main things:

  • States don’t have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
  • Every reference to “marriage” in federal law means opposite-sex marriage.

Judge Tauro ruled that the second is unconstitutional. The first provision is also constitutionally suspect (Article IV: “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.”), but it didn’t come up in this case, so it is unaffected.

The reasoning. Most of the coverage of this decsion has emphasized the 10th Amendment states-rights angle. (In ratifying the Consitutiton, the states never surrendered their right to define marriage.) But that’s not the argument that does the heavy lifting.

If you’ve read any other decision that defended same-sex marriage, this one looks a lot the same. They all start with the 14th amendment, which promises “equal protection under the laws” to every person under the jurisdiction of the United States.

In practice, this means that if the government treats one class of citizens differently from another, it needs to have a good reason. How good a reason depends several factors, but the lowest hurdle a law has to jump is the rational basis test:

A law that touches on a constitutionally protected interest must be rationally related to furthering a legitimate government interest.

In other words, Congress can’t pass a law just to screw with some group it doesn’t like. For example, the laws against burglary were passed in order to protect property (a legitimate government interest), not just to screw with burglars because their lifestyle offends Congress’ sense of morality.

Judge Tauro went through the reasons originally given when DOMA was passed, plus a couple of others put forward by the Justice Department (which defended the case on behalf of the government — more about that later), and found that denying federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples is not rationally related to any of those goals.

[For example, the administration argued that the federal government has an interest in the simplicity of standardizing benefits state-to-state. Judge Tauro found that the federal government had never before worried about the different standards for marriage in the various states, and does not now worry about it with respect to any other issue:

a thirteen year-old female and a fourteen year-old male, who have the consent of their parents, can obtain a valid marriage license in the state of New Hampshire. Though this court knows of no other state in the country that would sanction such a marriage, the federal government recognizes it as valid simply because New Hampshire has declared it to be so.

Worse, this new desire to choose which state-approved marriages it will recognize has actually complicated the federal government’s process rather than simplifying it.]

Putting Tauro’s conclusion very simply: The disadvantages DOMA inflicts on married same-sex couples aren’t unfortunate side-effects of a law with some other good purpose. Disadvantaging same-sex couples is the purpose of the law. And that’s not rationally related to any legitimate government interest.

The Obama Administration’s Role. This case puts the administration in a difficult position. The executive branch has an obligation to defend the laws as written. (Article II, Section 3: The president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”) So when someone sues to have a law declared unconstitutional, the Justice Department defends.

On the other hand, President Obama is on record saying that DOMA ought to be repealed. One way to get rid of it would be not to defend suits against it. But that’s a bad process, and is exactly the kind of abuse of executive power I complain about in other contexts.

Taken to an extreme, this practice would allow the president and one federal judge to repeal any law they don’t like: You file a test case in the judge’s district, and then the president orders the Justice Department not to appeal when the judge finds the law unconstitutional. Bye-bye law.

Imagine, say, a President Palin or Huckabee refusing to defend a suit against the insurance mandate of the health care reform law. We don’t want to go there. The administration should hold its nose and appeal, and I’m sure they will.

Israel, Palestine, and the New York Times

Without any intention on my part, this week’s whole Sift revolves around the virtues and vices of the New York Times. Maybe I’m just reading articles I used to skim or skip over, but it looks to me like the Times made a conscious decision to deepen its Israel/Palestine coverage after the Gaza flotilla raid.

Usually our news media looks at the world through frogs’ eyes. It only sees motion, so issues can drop out of its sight just by standing still. Israel/Palestine is exactly the kind of topic it covers badly: an ongoing situation where one day looks a lot like the next. These situations may be important, but they’re not “news” in the very literal sense that nothing new happened today.

That was the whole point of the Gaza flotilla. The Israeli government has been very good at pressing the Palestinians without making news, and the flotilla was an attempt to create a newsworthy event that would draw attention to the larger situation.

It’s been working, at least at the NYT, which lately has been sending people out to cover Palestine-related situations that lack any eye-catching event. On July 5 it published a long article about American charities aiding West Bank settlements that the Israeli government considers illegal. Israelis would not be able to get tax deductions for making such contributions, but Americans do.

The money goes mostly to schools, synagogues, recreation centers and the like, legitimate expenditures under the tax law. But it has also paid for more legally questionable commodities: housing as well as guard dogs, bulletproof vests, rifle scopes and vehicles to secure outposts deep in occupied areas.

Interestingly, some of the most radical of the American groups are evangelical Christians, known as Christian Zionists.

This article was followed up on July 7 by a “Room for Debate” segment where eight writers answered the question: “Do U.S. donors drive Israeli politics?”

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has been spending time in the region. Thursday’s column drew attention to dissident opinion within Israel, like Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis For Human Rights.

Rabbis for Human Rights has helped Palestinians recover some land through lawsuits in Israeli courts. And Rabbi Ascherman and other Jewish activists escort such farmers to protect them. The settlers still attack, but soldiers are more likely to intervene when it is rabbis being clubbed.

Kristof draws attention to something that I also have been struck by as I’ve dug deeper into these issues:

The most cogent critiques of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians invariably come from Israel’s own human rights organizations. The most lucid unraveling of Israel’s founding mythology comes from Israeli historians. The deepest critiques of Israel’s historical claims come from Israeli archeologists (one archeological organization, Emek Shaveh, offers alternative historical tours so that visitors can get a fuller picture). This more noble Israel, refusing to retreat from its values even in times of fear and stress, is a model for the world.

In Kristof’s previous column he visited a smuggler’s tunnel on the Egyptian side of Gaza. He reports that there are many such tunnels running 24/7 — enough that “shops are filled and daily life is considerably easier than when I last visited here two years ago.”

Far from hurting Hamas, Kristof claims, the blockade has created a tunnel economy that Hamas can more easily tax and control, while ruining the Gazan business community that otherwise might be a moderating force.

Short Notes

The Sift has a new look online. That’s partly because I decided to redesign, and partly because changes in Google Docs broke the way I used to do things. Comments are welcome both on the overall look and on things that don’t work they way you expect them to.

More and more people — the NYT, for example — are starting to notice that judicial activism is a conservative vice, not a liberal one.

It’s dangerous to heckle a comic.

Bonddad gives a primer on the lagging employment picture. And here’s another link to that NYT article about long-term unemployment.

Sharon Angle is working hard to blow what should be an easy job: beating Harry Reid in Nevada in an anti-incumbent year. Salon lists her latest blunders.

This one’s my favorite: After winning the Republican primary, she scrubbed her web site of a lot of the wacky right-wing positions that would hurt her in the general election. OK, everybody does stuff like that to a certain extent. But Harry Reid had saved the old Angle web-site material, and when he reposted it, Angle threatened to sue. How dare Reid make Angle’s previous positions available to the voters in her own words!

You know who’s most likely to walk away from a bad mortgage? Rich people.

July 12, 2010 – 12:36 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

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The Road Sifter

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. Next edition: July 12
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
— Benjamin Disraeli

In this week’s Sift:

  • Minneapolis. This week’s Sift comes to you from the best thought-out downtown in America.
  • Road Gadget: Three weeks with my iPad. I can’t give you a nice simple justification for buying one, but I like it.
  • Short Notes. The wisest thing Robert Byrd ever said. A local Fox station has an open-mic incident after a Palin speech. Republicans vs. demography. McChrystal is almost famous. Fantasies of Hezbollah in Mexico. A simple depolarization scheme. Glenn Beck claims Thomas Jefferson. And if money is speech, then speech isn’t free.
Minneapolis
This week’s Sift comes to you from Minneapolis, where I’ve been attending the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalists. In general the conference is not very relevant from a weekly-sift point of view, but Minneapolis itself is.

Any city that is trying to figure out what to do with its downtown should come study Minneapolis, where the planners have managed to steal all the useful features of a big suburban shopping mall without bulldozing their history or losing the flavor of a traditional downtown. Downtown Minneapolis is bustling, accessible by public transit, pleasant to wander in, and environmentally conscious. It’s the city’s hub for business as well as entertainment.

Downtown (see map) is really two shopping districts overlaid. The heart of ground-level downtown is the Nicollet Mall, an 11-block long stretch of Nicollet Avenue that has wide sidewalks and two traffic lanes reserved for buses — many of which are free for rides up and down the Mall. It’s anchored at one end by the beautiful Hennipin County LIbrary and the light rail station (which will take you to the Mall of America, if you really think that’s necessary), and at the other by the Convention Center. In between are a very un-mall-like variety of retailers, from unique local shops and restaurants to big chain stores like Macy’s and Barnes & Noble.

But of course this is Minneapolis, the coldest major city in America. So at a second-floor level is the Skyway — an eight-mile system of enclosed corridors that zig-zag across the downtown area. The Skyway connects the Convention Center, lobbies of the major hotels, atria of the big corporate and government office buildings, upper levels of the department stores, and another collection of restaurants and coffee shops. You can get almost anywhere without braving an uncontrolled climate, and the hotels and office buildings give you lots of fountains and other public art to look at. (Ground-level downtown has even more wonderful sculpture.)

Just outside the core of downtown — either on the Skyway or an easy walk from it — are the three major sports arenas for baseball, football, and basketball.

Many of the buses are electric hybrids that don’t spew out dark clouds of diesel fumes. And Nice Ride automatic bike rental kiosks are all over the city. You just drop off your bike at a kiosk near your destination and forget about it — another bike will be there when you want to come back.

And the most amazing thing is that it all works. America is full of failed downtown renovation plans that looked great on paper, but didn’t attract either people or businesses. This downtown has plenty of both — but isn’t gridlocked with cars — well into the evening, even on weekdays.

I can’t say how packed downtown is on a normal weekend, because this was the Pride Festival. While walking from a conference event to my hotel Saturday evening, I suddenly found myself in the staging area for Dyke March. A peppy young woman explained that I didn’t have to be a dyke to march with them, but I had somewhere else to be.

On the other side of the street (in more ways than one) I spoke briefly to a young man protesting by distributing free Bibles. (No thanks, got one already.) He clearly believed he was doing a brave thing, though as far as I could see no one had any interest in bothering him.

The most interesting thing I noticed while wandering through Loring Park was the number of vendor booths that had nothing to do with sexuality, be it gay or straight, for or against. One guy was publicizing the Automoto 3-wheel scooter (83 mpg and so cool-looking). It’s a crowd, he’s got a product to sell, so why wouldn’t he want to be there? To me, that said more than anything else about the normalization of same-sex relationships during my lifetime.

Road Gadget: Three Weeks With My iPad
Just before I got an iPad, an even-earlier-adopter told me: “You’ll love it, but it won’t change your life.”

That pretty well sums it up. Just about anything you can do with an iPad, you could have gotten done somehow with some other gadget — a smart phone, Kindle, GPS, laptop, music player, game machine, or voice recorder. According to an e-book I downloaded, travelers in ancient times even used non-electronic tools like printed books, atlases, or watches powered by some ingenious spring device.

But although I have found no unique capability that makes an iPad indispensable, it hits a sweet spot of utility and convenience that has me carrying it almost everywhere I go and using it many times a day. I’ve been browsing the web, reading books, making notes, listening to music, checking maps, playing games, and sending email on it. No single reason justifies the expense — “Now I can do X!” — but I’m glad I have it.

Web access. I got the costlier 3G-enabled version, mostly because I hope to remain connected when I enter the Internet-free zone where my parents live. But it has also saved me the $65 that the hotel wanted to charge me for a week of WiFi access. I do my basic web browsing and easy email on the iPad, and then cart my laptop to Panera when I want to do something more complicated, like write and distribute the Sift.

And that’s a good example. In theory, I could do the Sift on the iPad and travel without a laptop. At home I have synced an external keyboard to it, so the typing is no problem. The Pages app is reputed to be a decent word processor, and no doubt I could find some way to upload the text to my blog. But I haven’t been able to make the iPad’s version of Safari interface with Google Docs, so I can’t just swap the iPad into the process I already use.

I think that’s typical. There’s a way to do almost anything if you’re willing to be flexible and creative. But if you don’t want to re-design your habits around the iPad, there will be times when you want a laptop.

That said, the iPad provides a near-ideal coffee-shop browsing experience. A laptop takes over your table and forces you to plan where you’re going to put everything. An iPad picks up a WiFi network effortlessly and is as convenient as reading a book. The screen is large enough to be a good read, and the iPhone system of sizing and scrolling through a page is more convenient than anything on a laptop. Also, when I take a laptop to a coffee shop for an afternoon I have to search for a table near a power outlet. But the iPad’s battery lasts longer than I want to sit in one place.

People who already have smart phones won’t be amazed by the convenience of search for and booking a hotel room from the passenger seat of your car while whizzing down the Ohio Toll Road, but I hadn’t done it before, so I thought it was pretty cool.

Also, the month-by-month 3G plan is very convenient. My 3G access will lapse at the end of this trip — I’ll go back to using the WiFi at home — but I could activate it again any time I really needed it, and meanwhile I’m not paying for it. The speed is iffy — better in some places than others — and in general you’re better off with a WiFi network if there’s one around.

Email. The email reader is great when you need to go through a bunch of messages that don’t call for long responses. The touch-screen keyboard is adequate — much better than the tiny buttons on smart phones — but two paragraphs is about the max I want to type on it. I mainly use the iPad email as a filter, leaving any lengthy replies until I’m at a computer.

Apple’s MobileMe works just the way you’d want. When I go back to my main computer, the messages I downloaded into the iPad are still in my Inbox (but marked as read) and replies I send from the iPad are in the Sent folder.
Book-reader. I don’t think the iPad kills the Kindle, for the reason I anticipated before I owned one: It’s too heavy. The second day I after I bought the iPad, I was wondering why my wrist hurt. (Still, Amazon feels threatened enough to slash the Kindle price.)

A Kindle is like reading a light paperback, and an iPad is more like reading a heavy hardback; you need to think about how you’re going to hold it if you’re planning to read for a long time. The iPad is also a little larger, which doesn’t seem like much, but makes a difference if the Kindle fits into your jacket pocket and the iPad doesn’t.

Ignoring the weight, the iPad provides a great reading experience. As with the Kindle, I very quickly lose the “I’m reading on my iPad” awareness and sink into the book.

I wasn’t sold on the iBook app when I first tried it, but it grew on me — mostly because it downloads Project Gutenberg’s free books more easily than the Kindle. (I’ve often paid $1 or $2 to get a Kindle book that is free on the Web.) All my Kindle books are available to me through the Kindle app and I’m continuing to buy new books through Amazon, but I’m accumulating a library of free classics in iBook.

The iPad has greater resolution than the Kindle, but it uses projected rather than reflected light, so which is easier on the eyes is an individual decision. (The iPad has an advantage over the Kindle if you want to read after your significant other has turned the lights out.) Both are hard to read in direct sunlight, and polarized sunglasses make the iPad almost invisible. So paperbacks are still the best beach reading, especially given the sand-and-water thing.

Games. I’m old-fashioned in the games I play: Free Cell, Sudoku, crossword puzzles. I put a Sudoku program on my Kindle, but the interface was harder than the puzzles. I don’t play anything on the iPad that I couldn’t play on a laptop, but given the choice I’ll play them on the iPad, which for some ineffable reason promotes a more playful mood.

Deficiencies and disappointments. The main thing you need to understand about the iPad is that it’s been optimized for consuming information, not producing it. Reading War and Peace on the iPad would be great; writing it would be difficult.

The lack of a Flash player means that a lot of embedded video on the web doesn’t work. YouTube works, and I’ve heard good things about the NetFlicks app. But mainly you’re supposed to buy your video from ITunes. The lack of Flash keeps out free competition like Hulu. And if I have the internet and a microphone, why can’t I use Skype to make phone calls? It looks like the option has been designed out for Apple’s reasons, not ours.

Other deficiencies (like the Google Docs thing) look accidental and may get fixed over time. But every now and then I run into a web site that expects some Java-enabled something-or-other than either doesn’t exist for the iPad or I haven’t figured out how to turn on.

The Marvel Comics app was a huge disappointment, because it’s a totally new comic store (with a poor selection, at least for now) and doesn’t interface with Marvel’s digital subscription package. If they fix that, the iPad would be an ideal comic-book reader. (Reading comic books on a computer at a desk feels stupid; reading them in bed with an iPad is just right.)

Finally, the iPad comes with almost zero documentation, and the individual apps usually have less. It’s all supposed to be self-explanatory, except when it isn’t. For most of a day I thought my iPad was broken because the display wouldn’t rotate when I re-oriented the screen. Then I discovered there was a screen lock switch that I had flipped by accident.

Friday’s NYT looked into the future of e-readers. Nicholas Negroponte is planning

a slate computer set to be released in 2012 that will cost less than $100. Plastic and, he said, unbreakable, the computer will resemble the iPad and will “use so little power you should be able to shake it or wind it up to give it power.”

Short Notes
To honor Robert Byrd on the morning of his death announcement, Daily Kos recalls the most prescient thing he ever said:

If the United States leads the charge to war in the Persian Gulf, we may get lucky and achieve a rapid victory. But then we face a second war: a war to win the peace in Iraq. This war will last many years and will surely cost hundreds of billions of dollars. In light of this enormous task, it would be a great mistake to expect that this will be a replay of the 1991 war. The stakes are much higher in this conflict.

A Sarah Palin endorsement may help you win a Republican primary, but you’ll have to hope everybody forgets about it by November.

Meanwhile, a local Fox station had an open mic incident after a Sarah Palin speech in Turlock, California Friday. As the crew packs up, they can be heard to say things like “Now I know the dumbness doesn’t just come from soundbites.”

Lots of bloggers are discussing the “Demographic Change and the Future of Parties” report put out this week by demographer Ruy Teixeira. The gist is that by riding white-working-class anger and white-Christian social issues, Republicans are pursuing a very short-term strategy. The white, Christian, and working-class shares of the electorate are all shrinking, and younger voters lack the anti-gay animus so many candidates are relying on.

The growth action on the religious front is among unaffiliated or secular voters, who are the fastest-growing “religious” group in the United States. From 1944 to 2004 the percentage of adults reporting no religious affiliation almost tripled, rising from 5 percent to 14 percent. Projections indicate that by 2024 somewhere between 20-25 percent of adults will be unaffiliated.

This trend, combined with growth among non-Christian faiths and race-ethnic trends, will ensure that in very short order we will no longer be a white Christian nation. Even today, only about 55 percent of adults are white Christians. By 2024 that figure will be down to 45 percent.

By coincidence, Teixeira’s points were illustrated this week by polls showing neck-and-neck races in places you wouldn’t expect — Texas governor and North Carolina senator — and for a very interesting reason: Hispanics have turned against Republicans after the Arizona papers-please law. And they seem motivated to get out and vote. (A more recent poll gives the Republican a 10-point lead in NC, though.)

In the big story of the week, a group of guys forgets a Rolling Stone reporter is around and makes fools of themselves. Didn’t I see this already in Almost Famous?

Time magazine points out what ought to be obvious: People don’t backstab each other when everything is going fine. Counter-insurgency strategy is all about protecting the people and so giving them confidence in their local government. And that’s a great strategy — if you have a local government that deserves the people’s confidence. The government in Kabul doesn’t.

The North Carolina congresswoman who bravely exposed Muslims working as congressional interns and warned of the dangers posed by Arab-owned convenience stores is protecting the public from a new imaginary threat: the connection between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels.

Matt Yglesias notes that mainstream pundits love to complain about polarization, but you never hear them support any solutions. He proposes an obvious one: Elect representatives over larger districts and have proportional representation.

In any given election, Democrats and Republicans alike would have plausible pickup opportunities all across the country—even in New York City—meaning that it would make sense for the GOP to always at least think about trying to answer the concerns of American cities.

Then on the flipside, if Nebraska elected its three-member congressional delegation in a proportional manner you wouldn’t have the scenario where 41 percent of Nebraskans vote for Barack Obama but 100 percent of them are represented in the House by conservative Republicans.

Glenn Beck has devoted a bunch of time lately to “proving” that the Founders were all conservative Christians who never intended to separate church and state. These segments are typically nonsense — there’s a whole industry of fundamentalist “scholars” trying to make history more to their liking — but Beck outdid himself recently when he tried to claim Thomas Jefferson. Chris Rodda (author of Liars for Jesus) debunks.

The NYT’s Room for Debate blog discusses the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the law against giving material support to organizations that the government has labeled as “terrorist”, even if that “material support” is your public-relations advice or your speaking out on their behalf.

Digby points out the logic connecting recent decisions of the Rogers Court:

If you believe that multi-national corporations are exercising a right to free speech by spending unlimited funds to influence elections to their benefit, then you would naturally assume that exercising your right to free speech to influence organizations is equivalent to giving them money. The consistent concept for this court isn’t free speech at all, it’s their belief that money equals speech.

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June 28, 2010 – 9:50 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (6)

Popular Feelings

No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house. Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of government. … The task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive laws, but in getting the people to want them.
— Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 1913
In this week's Sift:
  • The Summer of our Discontent. Liberals have been quietly unhappy with the Obama administration for some while. Now big-megaphone folks like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow are starting to speak up.
  • Republicans Stand Up for BP. Whenever I lose faith in the Democrats, I just look at the Republicans. Things could be a lot worse.
  • The Umpire Strikes Out. John Roberts said Supreme Court justices should be like umpires. Retired Justice Souter explains why that is nonsense, and Senator Franken demonstrates how un-umpire-like the Roberts Court is.
  • Short Notes. Krugman wants a deficit. The No Fly List strands a Virginian in Cairo. The costs of unwinding Fannie and Freddie. Glenn Beck's novel. Israeli propaganda falls apart. The treason of JFK. The Right targets the Girl Scouts. And more.
The Summer of our Discontent
In spite of conservative charges that President Obama is some kind of Marxist radical, the Left has been quietly dissatisfied with him for some while: The stimulus was too small and mistargeted, too many Bush war-on-terror excesses continue, and the health-care bill began as a compromise with the insurance companies and got worse.
Still, criticism from the Left has been muted — until recently. This week two media personalities with a lot of credibility among the liberal rank-and-file — Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow — spoke out loud and clear.
Jon Stewart used the simple technique that somehow the rest of the media never learns: He contrasted clips of what Obama said about executive power during the campaign with what he is doing now. And then he invoked pop culture images of people corrupted by success (Jennifer Lopez claiming she is still “Jenny From the Block“) and power (Eric Cartman demanding “Respect my authoritah!“). All coming down to this:

Wait a second. All that power that you didn't like when someone else had it — you decided to keep it. Oh my God … you're Frodo!

It's the perfect image: I don't think Obama is a bad guy. But like the One Ring, the kind of power Bush established and Obama wields shouldn't exist. Destroying it takes courage, and I am beginning to doubt that Obama has that courage.
Rachel Maddow was so disappointed by Obama's Oval Office address about the BP oil spill that the next night she declared herself “fake President Obama” and gave the address he should have given.
On Tuesday, minutes after Obama's speech concluded, Rachel and Ezra Klein had expressed their disappointment in the vagueness of his assurances. The speech seemed to be more about image and theatrics, mainly emphasizing that the government won't forsake the people of the Gulf and won't let BP off the hook, without saying much about what is possible or how it would be done.
Rachel's fake-Obama (stage hands carried in an Oval Office backdrop as she started speaking) was more direct. First, she admitted that no one knows how to cap the well, that BP was allowed to drill this well even though no one knew how to respond to an accident like this. And so:

Never again will any company — anyone — be allowed to drill in a location where they are incapable of dealing with the potential consequences of that drilling. … We will not play Russian Roulette with workers' lives, and we will not play Russion Roulette with irreversible environmental national disaster for the sake of some short-term income.

She pointed out that since 1960s the oil industry has come up with no new techniques for containing oil spills, and that the techniques that exist have been bungled. (This is a point Fishgrease has been making regularly on Daily Kos, and Rachel's show is the only major media outlet I have seen cover that story.) And finally, she promised to push a much-stronger version of energy bill currently stalled in the Senate, pledging to use reconciliation to push past a filibuster, and to use executive orders whenever possible to implement whatever can't be passed by reconciliation.

we will free ourselves as a nation, once and for all from the grip of this industry that has lied to us as much as it has exploited us as much as it has befouled us with its toxic effluent.

The real Obama expressed none of this fierce determination, pledging (as he did in the health care debate) to listen ideas from all parties and work with everyone. 
Republicans Stand Up For BP
Every time the Democrats make me lose heart, Republicans remind me why Democrats are necessary. Time and again these last two months, Republican leaders have demonstrated that their hearts anguish over the suffering of BP, not the people or wildlife of the Gulf states.
The poster boy, of course, is Congressman Joe Barton, who apologized to BP's president for the “shakedown” of Obama getting BP to put $20 billion in escrow to pay claims. (This is great, BTW. It should head off the legal song-and-dance Exxon did with the Valdez. And while the size of the fund is larger, the general idea is no different than what the Bush administration did in other cases.)
Republicans quickly tried to distance themselves from Barton, who will chair the House Energy Committee if the Republicans win a majority in the fall. (That's the point of this DNC ad.) But Barton was just repeating a Republican Study Committee memo, not going rogue.
And he wasn't alone. Michelle Bachman encouraged BP to say “We're not going to be chumps, and we're not going to be fleeced.” That was too much even for Bill O'Reilly, and prompted this attack ad. And Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour argued the Mad-Hatterish point that making BP pay would harm BP's ability to pay.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has filed suit to get deep-water drilling in the Gulf started again. The six-month delay Obama imposed could turn this event into a “catastrophe”.

A great graphic brings home how the official estimates of the oil spill have increased with time.

21 years after the Exxon Valdez, a report says: “only 14 percent of the oil was removed during cleanup operations” and “the remaining oil will take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely.”

The Umpire Strikes Out
For decades, conservatives have campaigned to change the way Americans talk about the Supreme Court, with very little push-back from the Left. And so major-media discussions almost invariably assume the conservative frame: Conservative judges strictly interpret what the Founders meant when they wrote the Constitution, while liberal judges “legislate from the bench” according to their personal sense of empathy. 
In his confirmation hearings, John Roberts summed it all up in this metaphor: “Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them.”
Two recent speeches have challenged both sides of that construction. Justice Souter's commencement address at the Harvard Law School demonstrated the naivety of the judge/umpire comparison, and Al Franken's speech to the American Constitution Society exposed the activist agenda of Roberts and the other conservative justices.
Souter did not refer to Roberts or the umpire analogy directly. Instead he talked about the “fair reading” model of constitutional interpretation: “Deciding constitutional cases should be a straightforward exercise of reading fairly and viewing facts objectively.” This only works, Souter says, for “easy” cases — the kind that don't make it to the Supreme Court, because lower-court judges are perfectly capable of reading laws and examining facts on their own.
He gives two examples of the kinds of cases that do make it the Court: the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the Pentagon Papers case, two constitutional provisions clash: the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press and the Preamble's instruction that the government “provide for the common defense”. So the Court's decision to allow publication was not based on an unconditional assertion of press freedom — reading the First Amendment and ignoring the Preamble — but rather on the government's inability to support its claim that publication would harm national security. Publication of plans for the D-Day invasion, the justices said, would have been a different matter. Souter draws this lesson:

[The Constitution's] language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, all together, all at once.

And that's why we need judges, not umpires.
In his second example, the meaning of the facts changes with time. The Brown decision (which banned “separate but equal” school systems for blacks and whites) reversed the 1896 Plessy decision (which upheld the constitutionality of separate black and white rail cars).  

To [the Plessy] generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery to make it look unexceptional by contrast. As a consequence, the judges of 1954 found a meaning in segregating the races by law that the majority of their predecessors in 1896 did not see. That meaning is not captured by descriptions of physically identical schools or physically identical railroad cars. The meaning of facts arises elsewhere, and its judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own. Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page. [Emphasis added.] And when the judges in 1954 read the record of enforced segregation it carried only one possible meaning: It expressed a judgment of inherent inferiority on the part of the minority race.

And that's why we need people, not machines or Vulcans, examining the facts.
Where Souter's speech is theoretical and academic, Franken's is partisan and radical. The Roberts Court, Franken claims, is not just calling balls and strikes.

The Roberts Court has, consistently and intentionally, protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans.

A key technique of conservative legal rhetoric has been to marginalize the victims of its rulings.

So unless you want to get a late-term abortion, burn a flag in the town square, or get federal funding for your pornographic artwork, you really don’t need to worry about what the Supreme Court is up to. … By defining the terms of constitutional debate such that it doesn’t involve the lives of ordinary people, conservatives have disconnected Americans from their legal system. And that leaves room for lots of shenanigans. 

While the public's attention is focused on cases about government power, corporate-power cases fly under the radar.

If you have a credit card, if you watch TV, if you file insurance claims, if you work – in other words, if you participate in American daily life at all – then you interact with corporations that are more powerful than you are. The degree to which those corporations’ rights are protected over yours, well, that’s extremely relevant to your life. And in case after case after case, the Roberts Court has put not just a thumb, but a fist, on the scale in favor of those corporations.

… What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation’s right to profit? And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.

Franken listed a number of recent corporate-power cases and their results.

In Stoneridge, [the Roberts Court] stripped shareholders of their ability to get their money back from the firms that helped defraud them. In Conkright, it gave employers more leeway to deny workers their pension benefits. In Leegin, it made it harder for small business owners to stop price fixing under the Sherman Act. Now, the burden is on them—small business owners—to show that price fixing will hurt competition. In Iqbal, it made it harder for everybody to get their day in court. In Exxon, it capped punitive damages resulting from the Exxon Valdez oil spill because, get this, having to own up to your mistakes creates “unpredictability” for corporations.  Which, by the way, means that BP’s liability may be capped because the Court doesn’t want to cause an unpredictable impact on its future profitability. In Rapanos, it cut huge swaths of wetlands out of the Clean Water Act.  Wetlands that had been covered for 30 years. 

[I added the links. I encourage you to use them.] In this context, Franken finds the Citizens United decision (where “the Court answered questions it wasn’t asked, reaching beyond the scope of what they accepted for appeal to overturn federal laws the conservative wing didn’t like.”) especially ominous. If the Supreme Court has an anti-people, pro-corporate agenda, then it is all the more important for voters to elect law-makers who will fix the injustices the Court creates. (Franken cites two such examples: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the bill that allowed Jamie Leigh Jones to sue KBR, whose employees gang-raped her in Iraq and then held her under guard in a shipping crate.)
Citizens United (where “the Roberts Court overstepped its procedural bounds so that it could graciously provide corporations with First Amendment rights”) allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. How many law-makers will be willing to undo corporate injustices if it means facing attack ads with an unlimited budget?
The Roberts' corporate-power agenda is sheltered by its innocent-sounding “umpire” metaphor and the conservative narrative that makes it sound like common sense. Franken closed by encouraging the Constitution Society to push a counter-narrative.

In our narrative, the legal system doesn’t exist to help the powerful grow more powerful – it exists to guarantee that every American is entitled to justice.

In our narrative, we defend our individual rights and liberties against corporate encroachment just as fiercely as we defend them against government overreach.

In our narrative, judicial restraint actually means something – for starters, how about ruling only on the case you’re presented?

In our narrative, even if those big bronze doors have to remain closed for security reasons, the door to our legal system should be open to everyone, because what happens in our legal system matters to everyone.

Short Notes

I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

Like everybody else then, he under-estimated the unemployment rate. But the rest of this exactly what's happening.
So what's Paul saying now? He's getting increasingly frustrated at the consensus among the talking heads (not the public, incidentally, though you'd never know that from the media coverage) that we have to cut spending immediately. Government spending is supposed to be counter-cyclic: When everybody else cuts back, the government should spend, and vice versa. The long-term deficit is a problem, but the short-term deficit is necessary.

I always sensed there was something undemocratic and anti-due-process about the No Fly List. But I didn't realize it was quite this bad: A U.S. citizen who gets put on the List while he's overseas can't fly home, even under guard. So Yahya Wehelie, who was born and raised in Virginia and has not been formally accused of any crime, is stuck in Cairo until … until when exactly?

After he was arrested for marijuana possession in the US in 2008, Wehelie's Somali-immigrant parents sent him to Yemen to learn some good Islamic values, pick up a little Arabic, and maybe find a wife they could approve of. Now they just wish he could come home. “I’m not even a religious person,” Wehelie says, “I hate Al Qaeda.”

From yesterday's NYT: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wound up holding a lot of the mortgages nobody can pay, and the federal government wound up with Fannie and Freddie. So the taxpayers now own 160,000 houses — that's the current inventory, not the total number foreclosed — and the cost of unwinding the whole mess is estimated at $389 billion.

Fannie and Freddie are part of the conservative government-caused-the-problem argument. A good debunking of that is here, or in the book The Big Short that I reviewed two weeks ago. And I'm not sure how you blame Fannie and Freddie for stuff like this, reported by a Wells Fargo employee in Memphis:

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral. 

Drat on Chris Kelly for spoiling Glenn Beck's new novel. Apparently, Glenn took somebody else's bad novel and did a liberal/conservative flip on it. The original author gets a thank-you.

Carefully cropped and mis-captioned photos, spliced-together audio tapes … Adam Greenhouse and Nora Barrows-Friedman report on “Israel's campaign to spin the attack, distort the facts and quell an outraged public” after the Gaza flotilla raid. Meanwhile, the global attention is causing Israel to loosen the most obviously non-military restrictions on Gaza imports.

The US discussion of Gaza and the Middle East in general includes very few Palestinian voices. Here's a Chicago Public Radio interview with Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi.

My article last week on the demise of the Big 12 Conference was premature. The next day Texas worked out a deal that made it more profitable to stay than to move to the Pac 10, so the ten-team Big 12 will go forward. If smaller Big-12 schools like Kansas and Iowa State ever wondered who was in charge, they know now.

An anonymous tea-party consultant tells his story in Playboy. And an Indiana Democrat concludes this from watching a local Tea Party meeting:

I came away with the conviction that this group was ignorant, annoying, and clueless, but not, ultimately, a threat to democracy, mainstream politics, or the Geek Squad.

Digby recalls the “Wanted for Treason” poster of JFK that was passed out in Dallas just before the assassination. Just change the photos, and it would look completely up-to-date.

You know who's in the Right's crosshairs now? The Girl Scouts.

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June 21, 2010 – 3:13 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Making Change

There is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. 
— Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

In this week's Sift:

  • Saving BP. In BP's hour of crisis, its highly placed defenders reveal that it is not just a corporation. It is England.
  • College Conference Realignment. This only looks like a sports story. Really it's really a business story. And it is best explained by that great philosopher, Cyndi Lauper.
  • Follow-up on the Gaza Blockade. My view gets some unexpected support from Senator Schumer.
  • Short Notes. A cross-cultural look at the difference between liberal and conservative minds. Cheney's favorite memo is full of holes. Defenses of don't-ask-don't-tell get crazier and stupider. Off-set your infidelity. And more.
Saving BP
The proverb tells us that money can't buy happiness, and the Beatles reported that “Money can't buy me love.” But apparently corporate money can buy sympathy from the powerful.

Immediately after the oil spill, the usual energy-industry-supported politicians spoke up on BP's behalf. Texas Governor Rick Perry, for example, used the phrase “act of God” and said that BP “historically had a very good safety record from my perspective.” After a reporter reminded Perry of the Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 workers — think about that: a foreign corporation's negligence killed Perry's constituents — he spun that positively as well, pointing out that BP would have been extra careful this time knowing that it had “a bullseye on its back” because of its past sins.

I could give many examples, but you get the point: A lot of PR flacks work for BP directly, and a lot of them work for BP while ostensibly representing the American people. When the crisis hit, both kinds leapt into action.

After it became clear that you couldn't wish this spill away or pretend it wasn't a big deal, a lot of those voices shut up for a while. (Even Fox News' Brit Hume stopped asking “Where's the oil?” as if environmentalists had made the story up.) Then the second line of defense emerged: BP is an upright organization that will do the right thing if we just leave it alone. So Rand Paul (while still insisting that “accidents happen”) characterized President Obama's criticism of BP as “un-American” and said: “I’ve heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill.”

If BP engenders that kind of loyalty in American politicians, imagine how the Brits feel. (With our help, they've been overthrowing governments for BP for more than half a century.) London Mayor Boris Johnson denounced Obama's “anti-British” rhetoric — apparently BP is indistinguishable from fair Albion itself. And the Evening Standard opined:

One in every six pounds that UK institutions earn in dividends is derived from BP: a reduction will have a direct, adverse effect, not just on fat cats, but on British pensioners. This is bad for all of us. We can understand American anger at this environmental and human catastrophe but the punitive approach to BP will help no one.

That concern is being echoed at higher levels. UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne said:

It's in our joint interest to make sure that BP is able to go on functioning as an effective oil company

And Prime Minister David Cameron spoke with President Obama Saturday to “soothe transatlantic tensions” and stress “BP's economic importance to Britain, the U.S. and other countries.” 

A few observations:

  1. We're going to have to watch the Obama administration carefully, or this poor-poor-BP view will seep into its responses to the situation.
  2. The conflict here isn't US vs. UK. Like Exxon-Mobil or Shell or Chevron, BP is sovereign unto itself. (PM Cameron should see what happens if he asks BP to do something unprofitable for the sake of the realm.) The fundamental conflict of our era is between corporations and humans. Voters in all countries need to look at their representatives and ask which side they're on.
  3. Corporations always try to win sympathy by pretending to represent people: workers, customers, stockholders and so on. They don't. In a crisis, management always hides behind these human shields. But it will gladly sacrifice any of them when it becomes convenient.
  4. If a BP bankruptcy threatens British pensioners, the British government would do better to aid those pensioners directly than to protect or prop up BP. That's the lesson of our Wall Street bail-outs: Remember how the hundreds of billions we gave the banks was supposed to re-start lending to small businesses? Imagine if the government had just lent a fraction of that money directly to small businesses.

Who says conservatives lack a sense of humor? Responding to a Twitter-post about the possibility of using illegal aliens to clean up the oil spill, Cato Institute scholar Michael Cannon tweeted that “they're very absorbent“.  Yes, dehumanizing large groups of people is incredibly funny. I wonder if Cannon has heard the one about the number of blacks it takes to shingle a roof.

Ken Ringle, writing for the Watchdog website of Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, thinks the oil spill may not turn out as bad as most environmentalists think. He covered a 1979 spill near Trinidad for the Washington Post, and was amazed that the effects dissipated so quickly. Crude oil, he says, breaks down faster and is less toxic than refined products like diesel fuel. Some of the bi-products evaporate while others are eaten by bacteria in sea water. (We'll see if this applies to the oil/dispersant mixture we have now.)

A lot depends on the quality of the oil. His 1979 spill was light Arabian, the highest quality crude oil and probably the easiest for the ocean to break down. The Alaskan crude on the Exxon Valdez was harder to break down, and it spilled into a much less vigorous ecosystem.

Color me skeptical, but Ringle doesn't appear to be an oil-industry PR guy. He seems to be making an honest point based on actual experience.
Republican House leader John Boehner seemed to suggest that the government should assist BP in paying for the oil spill. Well, more than seemed, he said this:

I think the people responsible in the oil spill–BP and the federal government–should take full responsibility for what's happening there

But then he noticed how bad the headlines about a “BP Bailout” looked, so he backed out of that position, claiming to have misheard the question. Someone in Boehner's office emailed Greg Sargent:

No taxpayer money for cleanup or damages — period. BP pays. If the current law doesn't guarantee that, we are happy to work in a bipartisan way on reasonable new legislation.

Jon Stewart on BP's information-control tactics:

Apparently BP's greatest clean-up efforts are aimed at preventing fact-balls from washing up on the beach.

College Conference Realignment

Even though I'm a sports fan myself, I don't assume that Sift readers are. So I don't usually say much about sports, even when my alma mater goes to the Final Four two years running. But the apparent disintegration of the Big 12 conference seems bigger than your typical who-should-win-the-Heisman story, and you might want to pay attention even if you're not into college football.

In case you just said: “Colleges play football?” here's some background. Rather than hash out a brand-new schedule each year, colleges organize themselves into conferences: 8-to-16 teams that play each other. A conference is usually made up of schools that are in the same general region of the country, are roughly the same size, and have sports programs of reasonably equal strength. Most conferences include at least one titanic rivalry, like Ohio State and Michigan in the Big 10, or Oklahoma/Nebraska in the Big 12.

Fans get emotional about their conference identities and rivalries, but Cyndi Lauper was right, money does change everything.

So think like a business: College sports events draw a uniquely appealing audience for advertisers. Big schools like Texas or Florida have hundreds of thousands of alumni. So conferences like the Big 12 or SEC have millions of alumni, mostly with higher-than-average disposable incomes (being college graduates and all). And they don't all stay in Austin or Gainesville; you can find MSU Spartans or USC Trojans all over the country.

Back in 2007, the Big 10 tapped that potential by launching its own cable network. It seemed risky at the time, but now it's a gold mine. Because of the network, Big 10 teams get $15-20 million each in conference revenue-sharing, while Pac 10 teams get only around $10 million and the Big 12 a little less. So naturally, all the other conferences are looking into their cable possibilities, and they want to put together as salable a collection of schools as possible.

Two more economic factors: The top-drawer big-money bowl games like the Rose Bowl or the Orange Bowl (I refuse to include their corporate-sponsor names — nobody paid me extra) are now part of the BCS system, which gives automatic berths to the winners of the major conferences. If you're not in a major conference — I'm looking at you, Boise State — it's almost impossible to make it into the national championship game, even if you go undefeated.

Plus, the national body that (sort of) governs the conferences, the NCAA, has ruled that you have to have at least 12 teams to split into two divisions and have a conference championship game, as the SEC, Big 12, ACC, and Big East do. That's another national-TV big-money event, so it pressures conferences like the Big 10 and Pac 10 to grow.

But college conferences aren't like the professional sports leagues: The Pac 10 may want to expand into the Denver market, but it can't just start up a new school in Boulder. It has to find an existing University of Colorado that it can lure away from its current conference, the Big 12.

That happened Thursday. 

One school switching conferences is not unusual, at least not in recent years. Penn State (formerly conferenceless) joined the Big 10 in 1990. (Giving it, oddly, 11 teams; find the hidden 11 in the Big 10 logo.) In 2005 the ACC poached Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College from the Big East, which in turn swallowed Cincinnati, Louisville, DePaul, Marquette and South Florida.

But Colorado's move was just the beginning. Friday, Nebraska joined the Big 10 and Boise State left the Western Athletic Conference for the Mountain West. For the moment, the Big 10 has 12 teams and the Big 12 has 10.

But it's not going to stop there. Five other Big 12 teams are on the Pac 10 shopping list: Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M. (Texas is the big one. It's supposed to decide what it's doing tomorrow, and if it leaves the dam breaks.) The Big 10 may expand further: maybe just by adding independent Notre Dame, but possibly the Big 12's Missouri as well. What would the Big 12 have left? Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State and Baylor. Who's going to buy that cable package?

In other words, in spite of fielding teams as good as anybody's for a long time now, the Big 12 could be about to close up shop. And Nebraska and Oklahoma — arguably college football's greatest rivals, who played some of the greatest games in NCAA history — are going to be in different conferences for the first time since the 1920s. 

Sing it again, Cyndi, maybe this time with a country twang for the Big 12 fans in the Great Plains:

I said, “I'm sorry baby I'm leaving you tonight. 
I found someone new he's waitin' in the car outside.” 
“Honey how could you do it?
We swore each other everlasting love.” 
I said, “Well yeah, I know, but when we did 
there was one thing we weren't thinking of
— and that's money. 
Money changes everything.”
Follow-up on the Gaza Blockade

Last week I told you that the Gaza Blockade is targeted at the civilians of Gaza, and not just at Hamas. This week a strong Israel supporter said the same thing. Senator Chuck Schumer, speaking to the Orthodox Union:

The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose. Obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which it will use to hurt Israel. But the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re going to get nowhere.

And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go makes sense. So I think the boycott is important for bringing about peace in the Middle East. To show the Palestinians that … [interrupted by applause] … to show the Palestinians that a path of living with Israel and the Jews is a better way to go than a path of total and obdurate confrontation.

And so I think that Israel has to continue the blockade. And so far, that's what's going to happen and let's hope it continues. And it's our job to support it.

Schumer uses boycott and blockade as if they're synonyms, but there's an important distinction. If Israel doesn't want to trade with Hamas-controlled Gaza, fine. That's a boycott, and it's Israel's legitimate privilege to make that decision, just as people who sympathize with the Gazans don't have to buy Israeli products or perform in Israel or screen Israeli films or invest in companies that do business with Israel.

But to keep goods out by force, to prevent those who want to aid or trade with or invest in Gaza from doing so, is another matter. That's a blockade, an act of war. And to wage war against civilians — not to injure them accidentally while attacking military targets, but to target them intentionally — is both against international law and morally reprehensible.

The obvious response is: “Hamas wages war against civilians too.” That's true, and is also illegal and reprehensible. (As I said last week, I have no objection to a blockade that purely targets Hamas' offensive weapons rather than the civilian population of Gaza.) 

But from an American point of view, there is also this difference: No major American politician announces that shooting missiles into Israeli neighborhoods “makes sense” or “let's hope it continues” or that “It's our job to support it.” And I doubt that many American audiences would applaud if one did.

Israel has appointed its own commission to investigate the flotilla incident after rejecting an international inquiry.

Add the International Committee of the Red Cross to the list of organizations who are analyzing the blockade the same way I am.

The whole of Gaza's civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law.

Short Notes
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives a fascinating talk about the five innate moral values, and how the appreciation of them differs between social liberals and social conservatives in a wide range of countries.
Dick Cheney has been pushing for the release of a CIA memo that he says will prove the effectiveness of “enhanced interrogation” a.k.a. torture. Well, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has looked at the memo and found that it contains inaccuracies that undermine its conclusions. For example, it claims that waterboarding Abu Zubaydah led to the arrest of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, and supports this claim by misstating the date of Padilla's arrest: The memo claims 2003, but Padilla was actually arrested in 2002, before Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded.

Sam Seder reports on “escalating border violence” in this week's edition of “That's Bullshit!”

Arizona continues to put forward its credentials as America's Bigotry Center: Yuma's mayor used his Memorial Day remarks not just to denounce the effort to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, but to promote the larger stereotypes behind DADT. Mayor Krieger lauded the typical soldier who fought in World War I and on Omaha Beach as “a man's man” and said:

I cannot believe that a bunch of lacy-drawered, limp-wristed people could do what those men have done in the past.

Eric Alva, a gay Marine veteran who walks on an artificial leg after stepping on a mine in Iraq, responded:

Because of my injuries, my wrist might not be as strong as it once was, but my fidelity to this country and its founding ideals has never once wavered. Gay and lesbian service members have always fought to defend this country — soon, we will be able to do so as equals. On the next Memorial Day, I ask Al Krieger to remember our sacrifices, too.

Not to be outdone, top Catholic military chaplain Archbishop Timothy Broglio cut loose with his own barrage of mental static about DADT. After repeating what the catechism says about homosexuality (i.e., it's wrong), Broglio presents the following points as if they were relevant:

  • “unions between individuals of the same gender resembling marriage will not be accepted or blessed by Catholic chaplains” Did someone think they would?
  • “First Amendment rights regarding the free exercise of religion must be respected.” I'd love to hear the Archbishop explain how a soldier saying “I'm gay” violates somebody else's free exercise of religion.
  • “Does the proposed change authorize [homosexuals in the military] to engage in activities considered immoral not only by the Catholic Church, but also by many other religious groups?” Authorize? The Pentagon doesn't throw heterosexuals out of the military now. Does that mean it authorizes heterosexual acts? All of them?
  • “For years, those struggling with alcoholism have benefitted from Alcoholics Anonymous. Like homosexuality, there is rarely a cure. There is a control through a process, which is guarded by absolute secrecy. It is an equivalent to 'Don’t ask don’t tell'.” Ummm, Timmy … are you sure you thought this one through? The whole point of DADT is that a soldier can't say, “My name is Bob and I'm gay.”

That's the weakness of hierarchical systems. (You can't get much more hierarchical than a military archbishop.) The leaders aren't used to being argued with, so they say stupid things. Gene Robinson, the first gay Anglican bishop, patiently responds. 

The Sift is overdue in examining recent developments (or non-developments) in Afghanistan. I'll try to fix that in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, here's Bob Herbert's take:

If we don’t have the courage as a people to fight and share in the sacrifices when our nation is at war, if we’re unwilling to seriously think about the war and hold our leaders accountable for the way it is conducted, if we’re not even willing to pay for it, then we should at least have the courage to pull our valiant forces out of it.

A great parody of carbon offsets: The Cheat Neutral web site allows you to offset your infidelities.

I got sick of listening to other people's commencement speeches, so I wrote my own.

June 14, 2010 – 9:44 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (7)

Powerful symbols

Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. 
— George Friedman, 
 In this week's Sift:
The Gaza Blockade

When you tell an Israel/Palestine story, it's always hard to figure out where to start. Usually the right (or wrong) starting point can make either side sound like the good guys. In general, each side begins with some outrage committed by the other — as if that event came out of the blue, with no provocation whatsoever.

I think I'll start with the first thing I remember. That's a bias too, but at least it's a different bias than most other writers.

I remember the Six Day War in 1967. I was ten. It was June and even though school was not quite done for the summer, I was home with a cold. So like any budding news junkie, I lay on the couch drinking one Pepsi after another (got to keep your fluids up) and watching the war on TV.

I was a huge Israel fan. We all were in those days. The news media had played up the statistics that made Israel look like the underdog: its population compared to the total population of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria; the size of the Israeli army compared to the armies it faced, and so on. Plus, Jews had been victims of the Nazis and Arabs got their weapons from the Soviets, so Israel was definitely America's team.

In those late-Civil-Rights-era days I was as innocently racist as any other white 10-year-old American boy. So for me the war had a cowboys-and-Indians quality, with Arabs as the uncivilized savages. On TV, the war was just a bunch of arrows on a map. No live cameraphone videos made the destruction real. The casualty totals were just a scoreboard, and our side was putting up a lot of points. I loved it.

I mention this so that you'll know where I'm coming from.  I've lost patience with Israel over the last 43 years, but I don't enjoy bashing them. I'd like to root for them if I could. But I just can't any more.

Gaza and Hamas. Israel came out of the 1967 war with control of Gaza. They gave Sinai back to Egypt in the Camp David Accords of 1979, but Gaza wasn't part of that deal. Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

The strange arrangement that passes for local control made Gaza and the West Bank the responsibility (in some nebulous sense) of the Palestinian National Authority, but then the Bush administration pulled one of its typical stunts. It wanted support for its claim that the Iraq War was promoting democracy in the Middle East, so it pressured Palestine's ruling Fatah Party into parliamentary elections it didn't want. The far more radical Hamas unexpectedly won those elections, and then the Bushies changed their tune: They encouraged Fatah to fight. 

That mini-civil-war resulted in Hamas controlling Gaza, which it made into a base for firing rockets into Israel. Israel struck back just before New Years 2009 by launching the 3-week Gaza War, after which a U.N. report accused both sides of war crimes. Human Rights Watch summed up the response like this:

More than one year after the conflict, neither side has taken adequate measures to investigate serious violations or to punish the perpetrators of war crimes, leaving civilian victims without redress. Israel’s investigations have fallen far short of international standards for investigations, while Hamas has conducted no credible investigations at all.

Blockade. Israel and Egypt have been blockading Gaza by land and sea since Hamas took control in 2007, and sanctions go back even further. Last Monday, Israeli commandos seized seven boats in international waters (and an eighth on Saturday) trying to run that blockade. They encountered resistance on one, and killed nine passengers (including an American who was shot in the back of the head, among other places). Some other passengers and a few Israeli soldiers were injured.

In last week's Short Notes, I called this a “pirate attack” and was taken to task by an Israel supporter in the blog comments. I promised to figure out what I'm talking about before saying anything else.

In the reading I've done since, there seem to be three separate questions about the Israeli raid that could have different answers:

  • Was it legal under international law?
  • Was it moral?
  • Was it good policy for Israel?

I'm going to say “no” on all three. Here's how I analyze it: As my commenter pointed out, the legal question is more complicated than just whether the ship was in international waters. If the blockade itself is legal, then the blockade line can run into international waters if it doesn't go unreasonably far outside the territorial 12-mile limit. This raid happened 40 miles out (some sources say 80), but I'm not too bothered by that: The point of international law here is to prevent mistakes that widen the conflict. The flotilla knew about the blockade and had announced the intention to break it.

To me the key issue is the legality of the blockade itself. As in all these terrorism-related conflicts, international law is a little out of date. You run into questions that don't make much sense, like whether Gaza is a country and whether Israel is at war with that country. Leave that stuff aside; Israel is right that you can't apply the legalisms too literally until the law gets modernized. 

The truly relevant questions are: Is Israel defending itself from a legitimate military threat? (I think they are. The Hamas rockets may not threaten the survival of Israel as a country, but we wouldn't put up with rockets from Vancouver hitting Seattle.) And is the blockade an appropriate response to that threat? In other words, is the civilian suffering caused by the blockade simply collateral damage from an operation with a clear military purpose?

And here the Israeli case doesn't hold up. I think a blockade that purely intercepted Hamas-bound weapons would be legal. A blockade of dual-use materials would be debatable, depending on the balance between military benefit and civilian suffering. (The current blockade keeps out cement needed to rebuild homes Israel destroyed in the Gaza War, on the grounds that the cement could also be used to build defensive positions like bunkers and barricades.) 

But the Israeli blockade goes way beyond that, keeping out anything Gazans might use to rebuild their economy or make life enjoyable. The Israeli human rights organization Gisha compiled a list of permitted and prohibited materials. (It's not official — I don't think there is an official list — but has been compiled from the import requests that have been granted and refused.) Prohibited imports include most spices, newspapers, fruits, seeds and nuts, and a lot of other things with no apparent military value. Basic foodstuffs like rice are allowed.

It seems clear to me that the purpose of the blockade is to punish the civilian population of Gaza for its support of Hamas. As Dov Weissglass, an advisor to the Sharon and Olmert administrations, put it in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” In other words, the Israelis know how bad it would look to have Gazans dying in the streets, but they want to keep them as miserable as possible.

A blockade targeted at civilians is as illegal as any other act of war targeted at civilians. (The UN Human Rights Commissioner agrees.) So the blockade and the raid enforcing it are illegal.

Second question: Is it moral? Obviously not, for the same reasons. If Israel were just doing what was necessary to stop Hamas attacks, I'd empathize. (“If only that were true,” muses Peter Beinart.) But they're not. They're intentionally punishing the civilian population.

Finally, is it good policy? The George Friedman article I quoted up top is spot on here. A lot of Israel apologists have talked about how the flotilla was looking for trouble. Well, duh. That's the whole point of asymmetric warfare in its full spectrum from Gandhi-style non-violence all the way to armed insurgency: You provoke your more powerful opponent into doing brutal things that radicalize its opponents, alienate its allies, and demoralize its supporters. 

Mission accomplished. Israel had designed its illegal blockade to be just humane enough to fly under the radar of world opinion. (I, for one, was paying no attention. What Gaza blockade?) Now we have to look at it. That's what the activists on the flotilla hoped to accomplish, and with Israel's help they succeeded.

Cenk Uygur makes a good point about the 1-minute video that shows Israeli commandos under attack as they rappel down onto the ship: Israel should release all the video they have of the raid, not just the minute they want us to see.

I'm amazed at how seldom the media mentions the fact that Turkey — the source of the seized flotilla — is a NATO ally of the United States. Instead, Liz Cheney referred to “the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis“.

More flotillas are planned, including one by an organization of German Jews.

A public conversation is starting that would have been unthinkable not too long ago: Is Israel a strategic liability?

Interesting case made by Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books: Older Jews retain a strong liberal Zionist tradition, but among younger Jews liberalism and Zionism are splitting. 

Young Israeli Jews and young American Orthodox Jews, Beinart claims, are increasingly radical Zionists with little interest in Palestinian human rights. (A majority of Israeli high school students would ban Arabs from the Knesset.) Conversely, young American non-Orthodox Jews are mostly liberals who identify less and less with Israel. (In focus groups, young American Jews often refer to Israel as they rather than us.)

A 39-year-old liberal Zionist himself, Beinart deplores both sides of this trend, and closes with a call for 

an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. 

The Sift Bookshelf: The Big Short by Michael Lewis
I've been struggling for a year and a half to understand and explain the financial collapse of 2008. The Big Short is the most useful book I've found so far. Michael Lewis has taken the arcane details of credit default swaps (CDSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), put them together with stories of real Wall Street investors, and woven the whole thing around one of the standard action-movie plots to make a very readable book.

Here's the plot as you've seen it in a hundred movies: Life is perking along normally, but a Really Bad Thing is about to happen. A volcano is about to blow, aliens are about to invade, a bio-engineered disease is about to get loose — it doesn't matter what it is, the plot is the same. Anyway, a handful of people realize what is going on, they try to tell everyone else, and everybody just thinks they're insane until all Hell really does break loose.

OK, now imagine that the Really Bad Thing is that some large chunk of American mortgages are about to go into default, and make the whole financial system insolvent. The Big Short tells the story of how a few Wall Street outsiders figured it out and what they tried to do about it.

The characters are quirky and Lewis makes those quirks seem charming. Michael Burry, for example, never knew he suffered from Asberger's until his son was diagnosed with it. Obsessively reading stock market research in a room by himself just seemed like a good work ethic.

The hard thing to understand about the housing bubble and the financial collapse that followed is how so many people went crazy at the same time. Well, now I get it: There was originally only one crazy thing, it created a hole in the system, and all the other crazy things were just people trying to re-route the money flow to take advantage of the hole in the system.

Let me make an analogy: Suppose I invented a machine to turn rat droppings into gold. It would flip the whole economy upside down. Suddenly rat droppings are valuable. People leave their otherwise productive jobs to start collecting rat droppings. Other people start raising rats to get the droppings. After it turned out that my machine didn't really work, it would look like everyone was crazy. But there is just one insane idea, and everything else proceeds rationally from there.

That's what happened.

The original hole in the system was at the bond-rating agencies — Moody's, S&P, and Fitch. The investors of the world trust those agencies to evaluate whether the corporations who raise money by selling bonds are going to be able to pay that money back when the bonds come due. It doesn't matter whether an investor has heard of XYZ Corp. or examined its financials — if Moody's rates its bonds AAA, then they're good as gold. Every AAA bond, no matter who is backing it, is as good as every other AAA bond. At least that's what investors believe.

Now you need to understand something about the financial community: The people who finish at the top of their class get jobs with the big investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The people who finish at the bottom go to the rating agencies like Moody's.

OK, now the CDOs (i.e. derivatives) come into the picture. They're complicated investments that look like bonds but are based on huge pools of home mortgages. You don't need to understand them. What you need to understand is this: While there originally was some legitimate purpose to creating CDOs, at some point the smart kids at the big investment banks realized that the dumb kids at Moody's weren't very good at rating them. Moody's wasn't drilling down to look at the soundness of the mortgages the derivatives were based on, it was rating the derivatives by applying simple models that had been valid in the past. If you were really smart, you could create a fantastically complicated CDO that would fool those models. You could take a bunch of mortgages that should never have been made and turn them into a AAA-rated bond.

Rat droppings into gold.

Once the droppings-to-gold machine exists, the whole financial system starts to re-arrange itself to take advantage. Ordinarily, it makes no sense to loan money to people who can't pay it back. That loan is a rat dropping. But suppose I can charge a fee for making the loan and then sell the loan to somebody else who can sell it to somebody else who can sell it to somebody who can turn a bunch of these things into a AAA bond? And what if mutual funds and pension funds and insurance companies are as happy to buy those AAA bonds as if they had been issued by the U.S. Treasury?

Then it's logical to make as many of those loans as you possibly can. You can get rich by loaning money to people who can't pay it back.

That's what happened.

Now look at the secondary effects: Even as house prices go higher and higher, more people can afford to buy them, because the mortgage companies don't care whether they can make the payments. People start buying houses they have no intention of living in, because they can buy them completely on credit and probably sell them at a profit in a few months. And then people start building houses and condo complexes in places where no one wants to live, because they can sell them to people who have no intention of living there.

It's crazy, but it all makes sense given that somebody can turn bad loans into AAA bonds.

Now suppose you run a small hedge fund (like Steve Eisman or Michael Burry) or you are a couple of young guys (Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai) who are on a roll and have turned $100,000 of your own money into millions. Suppose you're just stubborn enough to drill down through all the gobblygook and arrive at the fundamental truth: These AAA bonds are based on loans are never going to get paid back.

What do you do? Well, you can try telling people, but nobody is going to believe you. Moody's says these are AAA bonds, and in order to explain why Moody's is wrong you'd have to find somebody intelligent enough to understand your logic and make them sit still and listen to you for about a day. And if you found such people, 9 out of 10 of them would refuse to believe that things had gotten that crazy. “Nah,” they'd say, even after they understood your logic, “that can't be right.”

In stocks, there's a tried-and-true way to tell the market it's wrong: You sell something short. You borrow the stock from somebody, sell it to somebody else, and figure that you'll buy the shares back and return them to their original owner after the price crashes. If enough people sell a stock short, they correct the system: They drive the price down to where it should have been to start with. Along the way they get rich, because they buy the stock back for less than they sold it for.

The market had no mechanism for selling CDOs short. But it did have credit default swaps (CDSs). A CDS isn't a “swap” at all, it's an insurance policy on a bond. If you have bonds that you think might go bad, you can go to a big insurance company AIG, pay them a premium, and if the bonds do go into default it becomes AIG's problem.

That sounds sort of sensible. But then realize that the CDS market is completely unregulated: You can buy a CDS on bonds you don't own, which is sort of like buying fire insurance on somebody else's house just because you know they smoke in bed. And unlike fire insurance, AIG doesn't have to set aside a reserve fund to pay off on houses that burn. (Congress refused to regulate the CDS market.) You're just trusting that AIG can pay, because it also is a AAA-rated company.

Now here's the final piece of the puzzle: Once you do your CDS with AIG, betting that one of the CDOs will default (OMG!), AIG can sell its interest in your policy to someone else. From their point of view, your policy represents a stream of premium payments, and it only requires a pay-off if a AAA-rated bond goes bust. So your policy is now yet another AAA-rated investment that is ultimately backed by bad mortgages.

Get that? Your attempt to correct the mortgage-backed security market ends up creating yet another mortgage-backed security.

This is how the losses on mortgage-backed securities wound up being bigger than the mortgages themselves. When a mortgage went bad, the holder of the mortgage lost money. But so did all the people who owned the wrong side of the CDSs based on that mortgage. It's like a casino takes $1 million of bets on whether or not you will pay off your $100,000 mortgage. When you default, there is $1 million of winnings and $1.1 million of losses.

So in the end, the people who figured out what was going on failed to correct the market, and instead became part of the problem. No one listened to them, but they got rich when everything went bust. Of course, most of the people who were wrong also walked away rich after the bailouts. 

As you can imagine, Lewis' unlikely heroes wind up feeling odd about the whole thing. Michael Burry got out of the hedge fund business and was last seen obsessively trying to learn to play the guitar.
Short Notes

The National Center for Atmospheric Research just released a simulation of where the BP oil spill might go given typical ocean currents. Oil pools up aimlessly until about Day 80 — around mid-July — when it hits the Florida/Cuba gap. Then the currents very quickly pull it up the East Coast to North Carolina before shooting it out into the Atlantic.

More about the BP cover-up of clean-up workers' health problems.

I missed this last week: Susan B. Anthony scholars Ann Gordon and Lynn Sherr did a reality check on the pro-life movement's (and particularly Sarah Palin's) attempt to claim the trail-breaking suffragette as one of their own. 

Harry Reid looked like a dead man walking just a few months ago. Now, as the Nevada Republican primary approaches and voters can see just how wing-nut crazy the alternatives are, Reid has pulled ahead.

You gotta love South Carolina politics. Where else could you refer to native-born American Methodist as a “f***ing raghead” because her parents are Sikh? (Sikhs, BTW, aren't any kind of Muslim, but some do wear turbans.)

How does Arizona get that bad rap about being racist? Maybe like this. 

President Bush confessed to a war crime, and said he'd “do it again to save lives.” Now if only he could identify any lives that he saved.

Rush Limbaugh believes so strongly in traditional one-man-one-woman marriage that he'll try it for a fourth time.

June 7, 2010 – 1:33 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Notes for the Crew

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. — Marshall McLuhan

In this week’s Sift:

  • Notes on the Oil Spill. First BP lied about how much oil was leaking into the Gulf of Mexico. Now it’s lying about what’s making the clean-up workers sick.
  • Notes on Race. You don’t actually have to hate anybody to be a racist. Just systematically short-changing them is enough.
  • Other Short Notes. Safety problems in biotech. Closing in on DADT repeal. Palin has the First Amendment backward. Hotter than 98. Rand Paul vs. the 14th Amendment. The $100,000 infield. What if Juliet had a sassy gay friend? And more.
Notes on the Oil Spill
BP continues to try stuff that continues not to work. The only plan that seems guaranteed to work is to drill a relief well, which won’t be ready until August.

Meanwhile, the disregard of safety that got BP into this mess is still operating. Now BP is trying to deny the risks to clean-up workers, with the result that many are getting sick. McClatchy reports:

Little-noticed data posted on BP’s website and the Deepwater Horizon site show that 32 air samples taken near workers have indicated the presence of butoxyethanol, a component listed as present in an oil spill dispersant used by BP, known as Corexit. The Environmental Protection Agency considers it toxic.

BP is not supplying masks for its clean-up workers, in spite of Corexit’s manufacturer’s warning that people should “avoid breathing vapor”. According to CNN, Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimpers Association, charges that BP has been threatening workers who speak out about health concerns. “Some of our men asked, and they were told they’d be fired if they wore masks.” (Wild speculation on my part: Public relations? Was BP afraid that TV images of guys wearing masks would scare the public?)

BP CEO Tony Hayward offers an alternative explanation: “Food poisoning is clearly a big issue.” CNN quotes this scoffing response from a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health: “Headaches, shortness of breath, nosebleeds — there’s nothing there that suggests foodborne illness. I don’t know what these people have, but it sounds more like a respiratory illness.” In short: They didn’t eat something bad, they breathed something bad.

I’m going to speculate here and connect some dots: If the problem is toxic fumes produced by the Corexit/oil combination, and if the oil keeps flowing until August, then it’s not just going to affect clean-up workers. Ordinary people who live in coastal cities are going to start showing the same symptoms. That’s even more lawsuit bait, and so BP is going to deny the issue as long as possible.

If you want to see the blueprint for this kind of denial, look back at my review of David Michaels’ book Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. Risking people’s lives for profit is standard operating procedure. It’s what corporations do.

I continue to be impressed by the foul-mouthed but right-to-the-point coverage from Daily Kos’ Fishgrease, who claims to have spent 30 years in oil and gas exploration and production. In this post, he explains why the Top Kill failure was obvious after 3 hours, even though BP took days to admit it.

Newsweek describes the BP/government efforts to limit press access to damaged sites.

This sums up the state of journalism: All the best interviews are done by comedians. I link to Jon Stewart all the time, but here Bill Mahr talks to Phillippe Cousteau (grandson of Jacques) after his dive into the oil slick. Cousteau comments on the environmental costs that are regularly passed on to the government and the general public:

Socialism … that word gets thrown around a lot. Well we as taxpayers in this country are subsidizing major businesses that are making billions and billions of dollars every quarter … They never really pay the full cost of their product. We end up paying for that. And that’s the problem.

Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, also dove into the slick, and described it for the New York Times

Only a few meters down, the nutrient-rich water became murky, but it was possible to make out tiny wisps of phytoplankton, zooplankton and shrimp enveloped in dark oily droplets. These are essential food sources for fish like the herring I could see feeding with gaping mouths on the oil and dispersant. Dispersants break up the oil into smaller pieces that then sink in the water, forming poisonous droplets — which fish can easily mistake for food.

… The timing for exposure to these chemicals could not be worse. Herring and other small fish hatch in the spring, and the larvae are especially vulnerable. As they die, disaster looms for the larger predator fish, as well as dolphins and whales. … In a short time, the predator fish will either starve or sicken and die from eating highly contaminated forage fish.

It’s hard to assess the political impact the oil spill will have. On the one hand, it is a disaster on Obama’s watch and so far there has seemed to be little he could do about it. (Much of the political criticism has centered on imagery: He should look more involved. He should do more to show the people of the Gulf states how much he cares.) He looks weak and ineffective, which is never good for a president.

But the political opportunity is to run to President Obama’s left, not his right. Deep Horizon is yet another example of the bankruptcy of the pro-corporate, the-market-will-take-care-of-everything philosophy that has dominated our government since Ronald Reagan.

The reason Obama is weak is because the government has let this aspect of disaster-response be privatized. The expertise to cap leaking wells is in the oil industry, not in government. So Americans are finding out what it’s like to depend on a corporation — a foreign corporation no less — when catastrophe strikes. And they don’t like it.

NYT columnist Bob Herbert brings that message home. He ridicules President Obama’s admission that he was wrong “in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” How could any intelligent person, Herbert wonders, have believed that?

Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?The idea of relying on the assurances of these corporate predators that they are looking out for the safety of their workers and the health of surrounding communities and the environment is beyond absurd.

… President Obama spoke critically a couple of weeks ago about the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the federal government. It’s not just a cozy relationship. It’s an unholy alliance. And that alliance includes not just the oil companies but the entire spectrum of giant corporations that have used vast wealth to turn democratically elected officials into handmaidens, thus undermining not just the day-to-day interests of the people but the very essence of democracy itself.

… The U.S. will never get its act together until we develop the courage and the will to crack down hard on these giant corporations. They need to be tamed, closely monitored and regulated, and constrained in ways that no longer allow them to trample the best interests of the American people.

The instant reaction of Republican politicians and conservative pundits was to minimize the spill and close ranks around BP. If the public decides it wants to “crack down hard” on “corporate predators”, it’s not going to trust Republicans to carry out that mission.

This week’s find is The Bobblespeak Translations, which claims to translate TV-talking-head-speak into real English — or at least humorous English. Its translation of Sunday’s Meet the Press has David Brooks saying:

This disaster proves that conservatives are right – there are limits to what government can do to fix the disasters caused by conservatives.

Notes on Race

Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul has inspired some interesting discussion about race on the lefty blogs. Last week, if you remember, Paul touched off a firestorm by saying that he opposed the part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that interfered with a private business’ right to deny service to anyone they didn’t want to serve. He denounced racial segregation and said he wouldn’t patronize a business that practiced it, but he didn’t think stopping private-market segregation was the government’s job.

Looking back at the 60s, there’s been an attempt on the Right to build a wall between the Dixiecrat segregationists (many of whom were Democrats like George Wallace or Democrats-turned-Republican like Strom Thurmond) and principled conservatives like Barry Goldwater, who had a position similar to Rand Paul’s. Jamelle Boule blows this up by posting an actual race-baiting Goldwater poster.

The whole I’m-not-a-racist-but line of thought is misguided, because racism isn’t just a personal issue, it’s a systematic issue. Suppose I run a classy restaurant in the Jim Crow South, and I have nothing against blacks personally, but I don’t let them in because they’re poor and uneducated and don’t know how to behave in a classy restaurant. Well, if my picture of the blacks in my town is accurate, that begs the question: Why are they poor and uneducated and uncouth? Isn’t that the result of systematic racism, and aren’t I supporting that system by keeping blacks out of my restaurant? OK, maybe I’m not doing it out of hate, but how much difference does that make?

The Tapped blog makes a similar point about a New York governor’s task force studying police-on-police mistaken-identity shootings. The task force found that non-white officers were the victims in a vast majority of cases, but its vice-chair said “That’s not the same as racism.”

In other words, police are more likely to shoot off-duty black officers because of unconscious assumptions about blacks, rather than because of conscious racial hatred. But that’s not “racism”. It’s a weird restriction of the usage of the term. Police officers are dead because they’re not white. That’s racism.

Jacob Weisberg draws a regional distinction between Republicans in various parts of the country, particularly the Goldwater-style Western Republicans (who are driven by anti-government economic theories) and the Wallace-style Southern Republicans (driven by race, religion, and social issues).

But Booman doesn’t buy it. He sees little difference between Western Mormons and Southern Baptists on social issues. And white anxiety in the West may focus on Latinos rather than blacks, but it’s still white anxiety.

So, what we’re seeing now isn’t a shift of influence in the GOP from the South to the West so much as Southification of the West. They’re not only becoming the hub of a new racial politics, but they’re growing more culturally conservative as well.

If you want to get publicity and make a name for yourself in a 3-way race, pander to bigots. That’s what Tim Cahill has decided to do in the Massachusetts governor’s race, where he’s running as an independent and is far behind incumbent Governor Deval Patrick and Republican challenger Charlie Baker.

When he heard that Gov. Patrick had met amicably with a Muslim group and endorsed cultural sensitivity training for police, Cahill released a statement talking about terrorism and “political correctness run amok”. The statement artfully invokes bigoted ideas without repeating them, juxtaposing phrases without actually connecting them.

So, for example, Cahill jumps easily from “Muslim” to “car bombing”. (Imagine using Timothy McVeigh to justify suspicion of all Christians.) He mentions his support for Arizona’s immigration law right after “families living legally in Massachusetts are hurting” — as if it were obvious that illegal immigrants (and not, say, Goldman Sachs) were hurting those families. Cahill’s statement says:

I fully support equal protection under the law for every American, regardless of race or creed, but …

The overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans are peaceable people who love this land, but …

Does it matter what comes after but? I don’t think it does. If you need a but, you don’t “fully support” anything.

Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King is also making the Hispanic/Muslim connection. Mexicans, Pakistanis — maybe there’s one big brown-people conspiracy or something.

Other Short Notes
OK, we’ve seen what happens when the government gets lax in regulating offshore oil wells. Now let’s think about biotech labs. Don’t we want to get government off the back of our biotech researchers, and let the market protect us?

The Israeli pirate attack seems to be getting remarkably little coverage so far. Ordinarily I’d leave this to next week because I don’t understand it yet. But I’m amazed this isn’t getting the 24/7 treatment.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell might be in its last year. The House passed a repeal this week, and the Senate got a similar provision through the Armed Services Committee. The repeal wouldn’t take effect until the Pentagon completes its report (due December 1), and President Obama, Secretary Gate, and Joint Chiefs Chair Mike McMullen would all have to certify that repeal would not harm military readiness or effectiveness. So it’s not a done deal, and who knows what will happen if there are Republican gains in November? But it’s progress.

Meanwhile, the usual rabble-rousers are wracking their brains to make up scary stories about gays serving openly in the military. As if nobody had ever tried this before. Israel and all NATO countries other than us and Turkey allow gays and lesbians to serve openly. None reports the imaginative problems anticipated by the Family Research Council.
If Sarah Palin ever has to face real questioning, I hope someone asks what she thinks “freedom of the press” means. A week ago in Idaho, she repeated a claim she made during the 2008 campaign, that media attacks on conservatives like her are “a violation of press freedom”. She appears to believe that the First Amendment protects politicians (or at least Sarah Palin) from journalists, not journalists from politicians.

Journalism, by the way, is what her college degree is in. She should know this stuff.

One of the staples of global-warming denial is to say that warming stopped in 1998. This lie is spun around a nugget of truth: 1998 was a spike in the temperature graph, much warmer than either 1997 or 1999. The overall warming trend didn’t catch up to it until (by some measures) 2005.

Well, so far 2010 is beating both 1998 and 2005. NOAA says:

January-April 2010 global average temperatures were the warmest on record.

So we may soon be free from the 1998 canard. Sort of. Random variation will probably cause 2011 to be cooler than 2010 (though warmer than, say, 2008 or 2009). And then we’ll hear again that global warming has stopped.

Florida Republican Rep. Connie Mack IV (son of congressman Connie Mack III and great-grandson of legendary baseball manager Connie Mack) explained in the WaPo why conservatives should oppose Arizona’s immigration law:

Our Constitution protects individual freedoms and liberties. Nowhere does this document speak of protecting the majority over the minority. Anger about the economy, increased crime and security concerns are fueling this law, not constitutional principles.

Speaking of Connie Mack, If you want to understand just how much baseball has changed in the last hundred years, recall that Mack’s 1910 championship-winning Philadelphia Athletics team was famous for its $100,000 infield — including third baseman Home Run Baker, who hit less than 100 home runs in his 15-year Hall-of-Fame career.

Speaking of Arizona, consider what might happen if police make mistakes. Here’s a case in Illinois where a U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico was nearly deported to Mexico.

And speaking of the Constitution, Rand Paul only supports it when it says stuff he likes. He told an interviewer for RT (a Russian TV network) that we should stop granting citizenship to babies whose parents are here illegally. This puts him on the same page as the 90 Republicans who have sponsored the Birthright Citizenship Act. (Like so many Republican bills — the Healthy Forests Initiative to increase logging and Clear Skies Act to loosen pollution limits come to mind — it does the opposite of what the title suggests: It takes away some babies’ birthright citizenship.)

The bill contradicts the 14th amendment, which says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

But that’s just the Constitution. Who cares about that?

And while we’re at it, who cares about facts? Paul said: “We’re the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen.” Deoliver47 points out that Paul is referring to the legal concept called jus soli, literally right of soil. Wikipedia lists 34 nations that practice jus soli. But other than the United States, they’re all barbarous places like Canada. I’m not surprised Rand Paul hasn’t heard of them.

Republicans want a special prosecutor to investigate a report that President Obama offered Joe Sestak a job in the administration if he wouldn’t run against Senator Arlen Specter. (Sestak did run and beat Specter in last week’s Democratic primary.) Even if everything claimed is true — and it seems not to be — it’s hard to see what the legal or moral issue is. Offering a congressman a job in exchange for voting a particular way could be bribery, depending on how explicit the quid-pro-quo is. But Sestak was making a decision about a career move, not a bill in Congress; if Obama offered him a different career move, what’s the problem?

What this does show, though, is that if the Republicans get control of Congress in 2010, it’s going to be the Clinton administration all over again, with endless investigations and one attempt after another to trump up a scandal.

Republicans have often used the phrase “criminalizing politics” to describe any attempt to enforce the laws broken by the Bush administration. But unlike the Bush cases, this is a clear example of criminalizing politics. There is no broken law, only ordinary political deal-making.

Just for fun: Second City Theatre demonstrates how tragedy could have been averted if only Shakespeare’s female characters — Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona — had had a sassy gay friend to tell them what’s what.

May 31, 2010 – 2:06 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (10)

Simple Diagnosis

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. 
— John W. Gardner

In this week's Sift:

  • Crazy is Too Easy. It's easy to write stories about how crazy and stupid the Tea-Party types are. But working-class whites really do have reason to be angry, and progressives haven't done much to focus that anger where it really belongs.
  • What About November? Why I've been ignoring the fall elections, and why I think panic is unwarranted.
  • How the EPA Can Punish BP. BP was already in trouble before Deepwater Horizon. If it gets serious, the EPA can make big trouble for the oil giant.
  • The Sift Bookshelf: Democracy, Inc. An insightful but annoying book that I read so you don't have to.
  • Short Notes. That Obama joke is a real killer. A congressman makes an abstinence video with his mistress. Texas rejects the common good. Leave your chicken suit at home when you go to the polls. Drawing Muhammad Ali. Arizona tourism commercials. And you'll never watch Star Wars again without thinking of this video.
Crazy is Too Easy
To hear the Bush administration tell it, all of America's foreign enemies were insane. Bin Laden was insane. Saddam was insane. Ahmadinejad was insane. Kim Jong-il was insane. (OK, maybe I'll give them that one.) The administration's domestic opponents weren't quite in that class, but they weren't rational either: They were Bush-haters; blind irrational hatred, naturally, being the only reason someone would fail to see the brilliance of President W.

The Progressive's Chip Berlet wonders if we on the Left might be making the same mistake with the Tea Partiers. His analysis is also psychological, but not so binary as sane/crazy.

It helps to recognize that much of what steams the tea bag contingent is legitimate. They see their jobs vanish in front of their eyes as Wall Street gets trillions. They see their wages stagnate. They worry that their children will be even less well off than they are. They sense that Washington doesn’t really care about them. On top of that, many are distraught about seeing their sons and daughters coming home in wheelchairs or body bags.

Mixed in with the legitimate fear and rage are darker forces: racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and a predisposition to believe in conspiracy theories. Those influences could rise to dominance and the whole thing could turn into a theocratic white-supremacist movement. But it doesn't have to go that way.

The problem (as Berlet sees it) is that no one else is channeling the legitimate part of the tea-party anger. The Obama administration has not embraced any radical rhetoric, and the Democrats in Congress are almost as far in the pocket of corporate lobbyists as Republicans are. Criticism from the Left has been muted, barely audible in the rural working-class areas where the Tea Party finds its audience. 

As a result, either potential tea-partiers have no explanation for their situation (it “just happened” or maybe it's due to unstoppable abstract forces like globalization) or they embrace destructive right-wing explanations (illegal aliens stole our jobs; Obama is part of a socialist plot to wreck America intentionally; all our tax money gets spent on illegal aliens or blacks who don't want to work; God has turned his back on our country because of abortion and gay marriage).

Calling these explanations “crazy” isn't going to stop them as long as they are the only explanations out there.

We need to be wary of the way centrists in both the Republican and Democratic Parties distort and confine the political dialogue. In their model, they are a noble and heroic center defending society from the “extremists” of the left and right. … The application of “centrist-extremist” theory reinforces an elitist view of democracy and suggests that only certain people are capable of participation in “serious” policy debates. It also implies that policy debates confined only to ideas validated by the political “center” should be taken seriously in civil society.

Berlet wants to “rebuild militant progressive movements and raise a ruckus.” (He's not very specific, but I picture the trust-busters and union-organizers of the early 20th century.) There's a story to be told about corporate profiteering and the corruption of our government by big-business money. A lot of people currently attracted to the Tea Party might find that story persuasive.

What About November?
For months we've been hearing about how the Democrats are going to get massacred in the November elections. The Scott Brown election was supposedly a harbinger of Democratic doom. (But the Democrats' special-election victory in the solidly Republican 23rd congressional district of New York is rarely mentioned.) The Tea Party rallies made good photo opportunities for the story that the voters are mad as hell at the Democrats and are going to turn them out of office at the first opportunity.

I've been ignoring that story for several reasons. First, I think the horse-race aspect of American politics gets too much coverage already. We have elections for the sake of issues, not issues for the sake of elections. So during the health care debate I wanted to talk about the proposals and what they would do, not about how the issue would affect elections a year or more away.

Second, a lot can change in a year. After Desert Storm the first President Bush looked invincible, but he lost anyway. The Brown election came at a low point for Democrats: The economy was still losing jobs, and you could say anything about health care reform because it wasn't done yet. By November we'll have seen a lot more health care stories like this one. (“Now he's finding out just how critical the new law will be to his family.”) Democrats will point to accomplishments like financial reform, and voters may feel more optimistic about the economy. Plus, Republican energy policy — and the larger Republican point that corporations don't need to be regulated — is going to be a hard sell after the BP oil spill.

Third, most of the predictions of Republican gains are based on the “generic Congressional ballot” polls rather than on specific candidates running on specific issues in specific districts. And I think such polls paper over very important splits in the Republican/conservative electorate. Rand Paul's tough week points out the difficult transition from a Republican primary — where everyone gets their facts from Fox News and candidates compete to see who can be the most radically conservative — to the general election. Come fall, Democratic candidates will have an easier time capturing all the “generic Democrat” votes in their districts than Republicans will capturing “generic Republican” votes. 

Finally, voter dissatisfaction with Democrats and the Democratic congressional leadership hasn't created any corresponding surge of positive feeling for Republicans. (Every now and then a conservative suggests that the public is going to start missing President Bush, but so far there's no sign of it.) The number of Americans identifying themselves as Republicans is virtually unchanged since the 2008 election, when they lost handily.

The first serious evidence of how the fall elections will go was Tuesday's special election to replace the late Congressman Murtha of Pennsylvania. The district had been held by a Democrat for years, but President Obama has a low approval rating there. Pre-election polling made the race look close, but it wasn't. Democrat Mark Critz won 53-45.

Putting that all together, I'll make these predictions:

  • Democrats will lose seats in both the House and Senate, but will keep control of both houses. This is not uncommon for a mid-term election when one party controls both Congress and the presidency. The Democrats won some pretty unlikely districts in 2006 and 2008. They're due to lose a few of them back.
  • While there is an anti-incumbent feeling that will hurt the Democrats, the damage will be limited. Voters may be wishing for an ideal alternative to their Democratic congressman. But when they get into the voting booth, the only actual alternative will be a Republican far to the right of the Republicans they remember.
  • Unlike 1994, Republicans have not come up with any clear message beyond “no”. (How's that “drill, baby, drill” thing working out for you?) If that's still true in November, even Republicans who win new seats this year will be vulnerable in 2012.

Rand Paul's opponent, Democrat Jack Conway, looks pretty good in this interview. A blind blogger answers Paul's objections to the Americans With Disabilities Act.

A side issue in generic Congressional ballot polls is that one organization — Rasmussen — gets results that bear no resemblance to anyone else's. Open Left has the graphs, which it annotates like this:

Rasmussen shows a clear, simple narrative of Democrats going from popular to unpopular, with a very modest reversal of late, with Republicans in virtual mirror image, while other pollsters show a much more nuanced picture, sometimes even showing both parties moving together, and with Democrats only briefly falling below Republicans in March and April.

Historically, Rasmussen has been a reliable polling outfit, and we can't be sure they're wrong until we can check against real elections. (So far that hasn't happened, which Kos thinks is suspicious.) But even Nate Silver can't figure out what is different about Rasmussen, and if you ignore the Rasmussen polls, the Democrats look to be doing much better.
How the EPA Can Punish BP

If you're wondering what can be done to BP in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, ProPublica's Abrahm Lustgarten has the answer: debarment. The EPA can bar BP from receiving any U. S. government contracts or doing any drilling on public lands or waters, “a move that would ultimately cost the company billions in revenue”.

Debarment is a possible response to a pattern of corporate misconduct and “an attitude of non-compliance”. The EPA was already negotiating with BP about changing its ways in response to past incidents, including a refinery explosion in Texas and a pipeline spill in Alaska — both of which seem to have been caused by BP's attempts to save money by cutting corners on safety. Whole or partial debarment was the EPA's stick in these talks.

According to e-mails obtained by ProPublica and several people close to the government's investigation, the company rejected some of the basic settlement conditions proposed by the EPA — including who would police the progress — and took a confrontational approach with debarment officials.

The article claims that the EPA has now broken off talks with BP pending an investigation of Deepwater Horizon.

as more information emerges about the causes of the accident there — about faulty blowout preventers and hasty orders to skip key steps and tests that could have prevented a blowout — the more the emerging story begins to echo the narrative of BP's other disasters. That, Meunier said, could leave the EPA with little choice as it considers how “a corporate attitude of non-compliance” should affect the prospect of the company's debarment going forward.

ProPublica's Gulf Oil Spill site is a good way to stay on top of the story. This is true of a lot of stories that play out over time, like, say, the financial bailout or the stimulus.

ProPublica describes itself as “an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” A 2010 Pulitzer winner, it is supported by the Sandler Foundation and accepts donations online.
The Sift Bookshelf: Democracy, Inc. by Sheldon Wolin
Usually my book reviews are meant to tempt you into reading the book. But even though this book is very insightful and I agree with most of its conclusions, it's written in a style I find annoying. (Wolin does too much preaching to the choir and loves the sound of his own rhetoric. I would have appreciated more step-by-step arguments, simply stated and tied to supporting examples.) So I'm going to tell you the most worthwhile things I learned from this book, with the idea that you don't have to read it now. 
Democracy, Inc. is about “managed democracy” — a system in which the people don't really rule, but instead legitimize their leaders' decisions through elections.

[T]he citizenry … has been replaced by the “electorate,” that is, by voters who acquire a political life at election time. During the intervals between elections the political existence of the citizenry is relegated to a shadow-citizenship of virtual participation. Instead of participating in power, the virtual citizen is invited to have “opinions”: measurable responses to questions predesigned to elicit them.

This is an important distinction, and I think the best way to understand it is to think about the role of secrecy and lying. In an actual democracy, secrecy and lying should be steadfastly avoided: How can the people rule well unless they understand what's going on? But in managed democracy an elite class decides what the government should do and then “sells” that program to the public. As in any kind of selling, omission and deception are two of the best tools.
Think about how the Iraq War was sold back in 2002-2003. There were at least five independent justifications for the war, each specious in its own way. (They attacked us first on 9-11. Saddam's WMDs were a threat to us. Saddam was an ally of Bin Laden. Saddam oppressed his own people*. Iraq could be a showcase democracy for the region.) If a customer voter wasn't buying one argument, the salesman public official would just switch to the next one. [*Saddam did oppress his own people, but that's not why we invaded. Other dictators were equally oppressive without provoking American intervention.]
The other important idea in this book is the contradiction between Empire and Democracy. I think a lot of us have an intuition about that, but Wolin nails it down very clearly.
We hear a lot about the moral justification for democracy. (As the Declaration of Independence puts it, “Governments … [derive] their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”) But democracy has a practical justification as well: The people who use and pay for government services are in the best position to judge how well the government is working. The best judges and overseers of a city's transit system, for example, are the people who have to get to work every morning.
Democracy makes sense because it asks the people about their own business: their communities, their roads, their jobs, their kids' educations, their food, their health care, their safety, their retirement security, and so on. Of course We the People should be making those decisions — we know that stuff.
Now think about the Iraq War again. The American people were asked to decide how Iraq should be governed. We voted for candidates who said things that sounded good, but what did any of us really know about governing Iraq? It wasn't our business. 
The more a nation is focused on Empire — on shaping the lives of people who aren't its citizens — the less sense democracy makes. This senselessness weakens democracy top-to-bottom: Deep down, the people know that they're voting on things they don't understand, so they start to lose faith in themselves as decision-makers. Similarly, leaders and opinion-makers come to look at the people as an ignorant rabble to be manipulated. 
Once those attitudes get started, they spread. Soon, the same techniques that manipulated the people into invading Iraq are being used to bail out Wall Street or to drill, baby, drill. During the long health care debate, most of the pro-reform effort was spent not advocating policy, but simply beating back falsehoods like death panels.
The best reason that America should disentangle itself from an imperial agenda is that it will destroy democracy here just as it did in Athens and Rome. To survive through the centuries, government of the People needs to stay humble and restrain itself to the People's business.
Short Notes
Just a joke: A bar in West Allis, Wisconsin burned President Obama in effigy. An Alabama geometry teacher used a fantasized Obama assassination as a lesson in angles and parallel lines. And a former Washington Times bureau chief being interviewed on Fox said “Osama” when she meant “Obama” — and then, catching herself, joked about bumping off “both, if we could.”
Not a joke: Prior to his scandal-driven resignation, Indiana Republican Congressman Mark Souder used to keep his constituents informed by recording a series of “Congressional Update” videos in which he was interviewed by staffer Tracy Jackson. In this video, Souder promotes abstinence sex education programs. The punch line: Jackson turns out to have been Souder's mistress. Yep, his mistress was interviewing him about abstinence.

Personal responsibility is a standard conservative theme, but when something happens to one of their own it's never really anyone's fault. The CEO of Concerned Women for America had this to say about Souder: “If Mark Souder is capable of sexual misconduct, it could happen to anyone.”

The Texas Board of Education passed its controversial new social-studies curriculum standards. Among other changes, they removed the phrase “responsibility for the common good” from the first-grade definition of good citizenship . The Wall Street Journal explains:

Board member Don McLeroy, who leads the most conservative bloc on the board, said that “responsibility for the common good” does not belong in the standards because it is “a liberal notion” that edges toward communist philosophy.

Election officials in Nevada rule that wearing a chicken suit into a polling place is illegal electioneering.

More from Texas: If you have a permit to carry a concealed weapon, you can take it right into the Capitol with you. The metal detectors are only there to catch the people without permits.
Greg Epstein reports an uplifting ending to an otherwise depressing story: In response to the threats Comedy Central got for the South Park episode that included the prophet Muhammad, May 20 somehow got designated as “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day”. The idea, apparently, was to draw stick figures of the prophet (which Muslims consider offensive) on sidewalks all over the country.

It's hard to pick a side in a conflict like this. It would be like protesting the Catholic Church's child-abuse scandal with an “Everybody Urinate on a Crucifix Day”. In other words, it's a legal, attention-grabbing affront to many people who probably agreed with the protestors on the original issue. 

Well, at the University of Wisconsin the Muslim Students Association decided not to fight or censor the drawings, but to use their own freedom of expression to embellish them. So stick figures labeled “Muhammad” had stick-figure boxing gloves drawn around their hands, turning them into “Muhammad Ali”.

Mother Jones lays out the corrupt relationship between right-wing talk-radio hosts like Glenn Beck and Goldline, the hard-sell high-markup marketer of gold coins that supports their shows and pays them to be spokesmen.

Video humor from The Partisans: A fake commercial for TLC's “Sarah Palin's Alaska”. And not just one, but two fake commercials for the Arizona Tourism Office.

Too cool not to mention: Jeff Hays wanted friends to know that he's going to be a Dad. So he announced it by re-making the climax of Star Wars. The twins will not be named Luke and Leia.

I review three books about death and the afterlife in the current issue of UU World.

May 24, 2010 – 1:34 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Days of Our Lives

The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy. 

In this week's Sift:

  • The Disruption Strategy: Unacknowledged Bipartisan Continuity. If neo-conservatives want to make Bush's anti-terrorism policies into an unassailable bipartisan consensus, all they have to do is acknowledge President Obama as one of their own. The fact that they aren't tells me that they're more concerned about two-party politics than about defending America.
  • Cutting Through the Nonsense About Kagan. It would be nice if we could evaluate Elena Kagan on her actual virtues and vices. So far it doesn't seem to be happening.
  • Pray for Separation of Church and State. Church-and-state law is usually defined by cases that are more symbolic than consequential. The latest concerns the National Day of Prayer, which you just missed.
  • Short Notes. Arizona's non-existent immigrant crime wave. Nazi Tourette Syndrome. The political consequences of Neanderthal DNA. E coli conservatives and Jack Bauer Republicans. The morality of corporations. And more.
The Disruption Strategy: Unacknowledged Bipartisan Continuity

Here's something David Frum said on CNN in the wake of the failed Times Square bombing:

If you look at the period from 1990 to 2001, each terrorist plot (even the ones that are defeated) is more sophisticated, more elaborate — more people, more moving parts — than the one before. Since 9-11, each plot: less sophisticated, fewer moving parts, until finally you're in a situation where people make bad bombs because they can't communicate. This is what success in the War on Terror looks like. 

In other words: As long as people hate us, some of them will try to do us harm. But if we have good intelligence, good surveillance, and take action against terrorist safe havens and training grounds whenever we find them, they won't be able to put together the kind of big, complicated plots that might actually work on a 9-11 scale. 

If I wanted to, I could argue. (Occasionally some of those small plots are going to do serious damage, a la Timothy McVeigh. And we shouldn't gloss over the why-do-they-hate-us question.) But instead I'll point this out: Frum is an intelligent person making a legitimate point about the security policy of the United States. He sees things from a conservative point of view. But given that ideological perspective, he's commenting fairly and honestly.

We used to have this kind of discussion all the time during the Cold War. Hawks and doves would argue about whether we needed more weapons or less, about whether arms control treaties could work, and about how (or whether) to fight some particular war like Vietnam or Korea. But the mainstream of both parties recognized some common ideas: 
  • President Truman had put forward a strategy of “Containment” against the Soviet Union, and all presidents after him were carrying it out in one form or another. (The goal of Containment — collapse of the Soviet empire from within, no American attack needed — was achieved during the presidency of the first President Bush. That success came from 40 years of consistent policy by four Democratic presidents and five Republicans.)
  • Containment required that we maintain a credible nuclear deterrent and a military force capable of responding to Soviet attack wherever it might occur.
  • We were not going to start World War III on our own. (In an Eisenhower-era policy known as massive retaliation we threatened to escalate any Soviet attack to nuclear war, but even this was a reactive stance rather than an aggressive one.)

For 40 years, through nine administrations, that was gospel.

If you listen to mainstream Republican rhetoric today, you would never guess that we are seeing a similar continuity in policy from Bush to Obama. President Obama has taken the edge off of some of the Bush administration's worst excesses — black sites, torture, and so on — and does not have such an in-your-face attitude towards international organizations and other countries in general. But by and large he has continued the Bush anti-terrorism strategy that we might call Disruption. Under Obama we are:

  • winding down the Iraq War along the lines already mapped out under Bush
  • escalating in Afghanistan
  • continuing Predator drone strikes against suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan
  • defending internal spying and surveillance practices widely considered unconstitutional prior to the Bush administration

The friendlier face Obama presents to the outside world can be seen as an attempt to do Disruption better: to get more international cooperation (especially in Muslim countries) in tracking terrorist plots and in disrupting their communications and financing.

Conservatives should be happier about all this continuity than I am. They might react to it by breathing a sigh of relief and touting the successes of the bipartisan Disruption strategy, as Frum is doing. That's what they would do, in fact, if they took the War on Terror seriously and cared about our strategy for fighting it. Recognizing Disruption as a bipartisan strategy would cement it in place and make it very hard to dislodge in the future. If you're a patriotic American who really believes that Disruption is the right strategy for protecting our country, then establishing Disruption as a bipartisan consensus should be your goal.

But a comment like Frum's is actually quite rare, and that points to a darker truth: Most Republicans don't really believe their own rhetoric about the War on Terror being a “generational conflict” or an existential struggle. Terrorism is just another chip in the poker game of politics. If claiming that Obama has drastically reversed Bush's strategy allows them to paint Democrats as weak, if it sets them up to benefit politically in case of a successful terrorist attack — well then that's what they're going to do. That's far more important than cementing in place the policy that they believe to be correct.

Cutting Through the Nonsense About Kagan

Ultimately, the public discussion about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is going to revolve around a few key points, and it would be nice if those points were actually true and pertinent. So while there will be plenty of time to consider what kind of judge Kagan will be, I'm going to start by shooting down nonsensical and irrelevant points about her.

Is she gay? The right answer is: Who cares? Did anybody discuss John Roberts' sex life? Or his ethnicity, like we discussed Sotomayor's? We never talk about how being a straight white male will affect a guy's jurisprudence, because straight white males are “normal”. 

Unfortunately, though, some people do care about Kagan's sexual preference, and they're going to interpret a who-cares answer as a yes. So we have to talk about it. But I don't want to concede that the question has any relevance to whether she'll be a good judge.

The evidence that Kagan is a lesbian boils down to: She's a middle-aged woman who has never been married and she looks kind of butch. For some people, I guess, that's enough. Of course it's also possible that her career path hasn't left her a lot of time for relationships, her power and intellect intimidate potential dates, and she doesn't have the movie-star looks that would motivate a man to overcome those two obstacles. You choose.

For what it's worth, anonymous Kagan friends have told Politico that she's straight. And anonymous friends would never lie, so … it really doesn't mean anything, does it?
Is she anti-military? Supposedly Kagan banned military recruiting at Harvard Law School while she was dean there.

The real story was told in the Wall Street Journal by Kagan's predecessor Robert Clark: Harvard Law School and the military judge advocate generals have been doing a symbolic dance since 1979, when HLS instituted a non-discrimination policy. Any employer who wants to use HLS's Office of Career Services has to sign a non-discrimination statement, which the Pentagon can't do because of don't-ask-don't-tell. 

The JAG recruiters have never been banned from campus, and have continued to recruit via work-arounds like using facilities of the HLS Veterans' Association rather than the OCS. 

In 2002 (just before Kagan's term as dean), the Pentagon threatened to cancel all of Harvard University's military funding (hundreds of millions of dollars) unless they were granted an exception from HLS's non-discrimination policy. HLS caved. “Virtually all law schools affiliated with large universities did the same,” Clark writes.

In 2004, the law that allowed the Pentagon to make its threat was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court. In response, Dean Kagan rolled HLS' policy back to what it had been before 2002. A semester later the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court, and Kagan reinstated the military's exemption from the non-discrimination policy.

In short, this is a long-standing institutional tug-of-war between many major law schools and the Pentagon, not Kagan grinding some personal anti-military gay-rights ax. She briefly stood up for her institution's rights while she was dean. No students were affected and military recruiting was not impaired.

Is she “Obama's Harriet Miers”? Conservatives shot this bullet already against Sotomayor, but here we go again. I love Jon Stewart's reaction:

It's like no matter what happens during the Obama administration, there's the perfect Bush f**k-up for the occasion.

Harriet Miers was President Bush's failed Supreme Court nominee in 2005. She had been Bush's personal lawyer, and much of her resume consisted of jobs Bush appointed her to as he rose up the political ladder. So the Miers comparison combines two criticisms: That Kagan isn't qualified for the Supreme Court and that she's too close to President Obama.

The not-qualified complaint arises mainly because she hasn't been a judge before. This is a little unusual in recent decades (the typical nominee is an appellate judge), but not altogether strange. Recent Chief Justices William Rehnquist and Earl Warren had never been judges before joining the court, and neither had the first great chief justice, John Marshall. Kagan's main qualifications are her academic career and government work in the Clinton and Obama administrations. She clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall. 

It's also worth pointing out that Kagan would have had ten years of experience as an appellate judge by now (President Clinton nominated her in 1999), but Republican Senator Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings on her nomination.

The too-close complaint arises mainly because the top level of legal scholarship is a small world. Kagan and Obama were colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School from 1991-1995. They both graduated from Harvard Law School, but didn't attend at the same time. She's currently Obama's solicitor general. Obviously, her 1999 nomination as appellate judge and her appointment as dean of Harvard Law had nothing to do with Obama.

Does she disrespect the Constitution? The most inept criticism of Kagan came from the Republican National Committee and specifically from its chairman Michael Steele.  An RNC memo wondered if Kagan still agreed with a Thurgood Marshall statement that the original Constitution was “defective”.  An embarrassed Republican blogger wrote: “But of course the answer should be, yes.” It's hard to argue that allowing slavery or restricting the vote to men (exactly what Marshall was referring to) weren't defects.

Pray For the Separation of Church and State
Whether you pray every day or not at all, I'll bet you missed the National Day of Prayer on May 6. It was established by Congress in 1952, is proclaimed annually by the President, and has been celebrated on the first Thursday of May since 1988.

Ostensibly a non-sectarian holiday like Thanksgiving (there's no reason you can't thank Allah or the Great Mother for your blessings, or even just be vaguely grateful to no one in particular), in practice the NDoP belongs to the Religious Right. The self-appointed National Day of Prayer Task Force is co-located with Focus on the Family and is headed by James Dobson's wife Shirley. If you aren't plugged in to the Religious Right, May 6 probably went by without you even noticing.

In short, the NDoP is just the kind of no-big-deal event out of which case law is made. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has sued to have it declared an unconstitutional establishment of religion, and in April they won at the district level. Judge Barbara Crabb enjoined President Obama from proclaiming the NDoP, but stayed the enforcement of her ruling pending appeal.

Judge Crabb's ruling is a good primer on church/state law. The First Amendment's phrase establishment of religion sounds clear until you try to apply it. Not even the Founders agreed on what it meant. (President Washington proclaimed Thanksgiving in 1789, but President Jefferson refused on constitutional grounds in 1801.) So the Supreme Court has struggled over the years to come up with more transparent tests.

Three tests are relevant here. First, whether or not a law benefits or harms religion, is it motivated by a secular purpose? My favorite example (which no one ever uses, for some reason) is military chaplaincy. The government pays ministers to perform religious rituals for our soldiers, but the practice passes constitutional muster because it has benefits for the military, namely recruiting and morale. (If joining the military meant giving up the rituals of your religion, a lot of people just wouldn't do it.)

Second, does the law divide citizens into insiders and outsiders? Justice O'Connor put it like this in 1989:

government cannot endorse the religious practices and beliefs of some citizens without sending a clear message to nonadherents that they are outsiders or less than full members of the political community.

So imagine being a Hindu mother battling your Christian ex-husband for custody of the children. You walk into court and see a cross hanging on the wall behind the judge. How confident are you that you're going to get a fair hearing?

And finally, is the government unnecessarily taking sides in a religious controversy? This is the argument I think should ultimately prevail (but so far hasn't) in the Pledge of Allegiance case: Why does the government need to state a position on the existence of God?

According to Judge Crabb, the NDoP fails all these tests: Its primary purpose is to promote religion, it tells the non-religious that they are second-class citizens, and it unnecessarily embroils the government in religious controversy.

To me it comes down to this: Plenty of special days are recognized without the government's help. (I haven't found any presidential proclamation of Valentine's Day, for example.) If the National Day of Prayer Task Force wants to make its own proclamation, it can. What does government involvement add?

As far as I can see, it only adds what Justice O'Connor said the government shouldn't be doing: sorting the citizenry into insiders and outsiders.

This is how you run for governor in an Alabama Republican primary these days: An attack ad implied that candidate Bradley Byrne supported evolution and questioned the Bible. So Byrne issued a statement to set the record straight:

I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true. … My faith is at the center of my life and my belief in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and Lord guides my every action. … [T]he record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books.

This week's discovery is the Texas Freedom Network, which bills itself as “a mainstream voice to counter the religious right”. Their blog, the TFN Insider, has stories like Is the Religious Right Shilling for Big Oil?, which critiques an example of

how the religious right uses its influence with people of faith to lobby for powerful economic interests associated with the political right. Instead of a story told ”from a biblical perspective,” we get a propaganda piece from the perspective of oil companies opposed to regulations that might hurt their profits.

TFN also issues reports like Just Say Don't Know about the misinformation and ineffectiveness of Texas' abstinence-only sex education. TFN is also my best source of information on the right-wing attempts to distort the Texas public school curriculum.

Short Notes

The sympathetic view of Arizona's draconian immigration law says that they had to do something about a sudden increase gang-related crime spilling over from Mexico. (I've passed on that justification myself.) But the statistics don't support that story:

Media reports on the supposed crime wave … are held together with a string of conditional statements –“seems as though,” “might indicate.” Few contain police data, which is continuously available to those seeking public information. Barely any reports present the ample countervailing evidence that the United States has yet to be substantially affected by Mexican drug violence.

Among the law's critics you'll find the Phoenix chief of police.

Glenn Beck has ridiculed people who compare Arizona to Nazi Germany. So the Daily Show's Lewis Black compiled Beck's references to Nazism: 

This is a guy who uses more swastika props and video of the Nuremberg rallies than the History Channel. … Glenn Beck has Nazi Tourette's: My goodness this is delicious. HITLER! That's a very nice tie you're wearing Jon. GOEBBELS!

Biologists have sequenced enough DNA to conclude that Neanderthals must have interbred with humans emigrating out of Africa.

You know what has to come next: White supremacists will portray the Neanderthals as a lost Hyperborean civilization, too generous and trusting to handle the barbarians coming out of Africa, and surviving just long enough to pass their brainy, high-culture DNA down to Europeans and Asians. The movie script almost writes itself. Overnight, Neanderthal becomes a compliment.

Daily Kos' Fishgrease gives a foul-mouthed but informative primer on those inflatable lines that are supposed to stop the oil slick. And a sequel.

Rachel Maddow made a good point Friday: As we talk about the ever-growing oil spill and the malfeasance that caused it, we shouldn't fall into the trap of characterizing BP, Transocean, and Halliburton as “bad” corporations. They are just corporations, doing what corporations do when governments let them: cutting corners and making private profit out of public risk.

A corporation is not a person. A corporation is not moral or immoral. A corporation is by design a device that is created by humans … and its purpose is to seek profit. … If you want [corporations] to not do those things, you have to stop them.

Rick Perlstein connects anti-government-regulation ideology to our food-safety problems and simultaneously coins a great phrase: e-coli conservatives.

Another great phrase: The Daily Beast tells us about the Jack Bauer Republicans — two Iraq veterans who parlayed their records of detainee abuse into nominations for congress.

Over the last month the Democrats have been sneaking up in polls of the “generic Congressional ballot”. The most recent TPM average has them ever-so-slightly ahead for the first time since November.

Maine, the last remaining habitat of moderate Republican senators, just had its Republican Party platform re-written along the lines of the Tea Party. Oh, and the conventioneers stole a poster from a middle-school classroom because it was too liberal.

Jon Stewart thinks the phrase “the American people” is so overused that it has become meaningless.

May 17, 2010 – 12:50 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (6)

What Goes Without Saying

NO SIFT NEXT WEEK. BACK MAY 17.
People will do anything, no matter how stupid, in order to avoid facing their own souls. — Carl Jung

In this week’s Sift:

  • The Thing Behind the Thing. Lying behind the issues we argue about are the issues we take for granted. When those get challenged, things get ugly.
  • Oil Spill. It’s too soon to say much about the spill other than: Nobody had a plan for this.
  • Guest Workers. If we need workers, why can’t we just let people immigrate normally, become citizens someday, and vote?
  • Chickens for Check-ups. Sue Lowden’s idea is silly even without the chickens.
  • Short Notes. The economy muddles along. Nova’s “Mind Over Money”. How lobbyists corrupt government. Covering Virginia’s racy state seal. A survey of crazy state legislation. Soldiers go GaGa. And more.
The Thing Behind the Thing

Politics is like marriage in some ways.

In marriage, the most unbridgeable differences are the ones that go without saying — the stuff that everybody knows, or should know; the unstated (maybe even unconscious) assumptions about how the world works. One spouse assumes that marriage leads immediately to children, the other that a long negotiation will happen first. In either case, it’s just what people do; anything else would be weird. Of course Mom will live with us when she can’t take care of herself any more. Of course we’ll move across the country when I get that big promotion. Of course we’ll buy a minivan and a house in the suburbs when the baby comes.

Of course. It goes without saying.

Politics is like that too. We have a lot of very public issues and debates going on in this country: what to do about immigration, energy, health care, unemployment, the deficit, and so on. But behind them all lurk a few issues that we don’t talk about, because they just seem to be common sense. When someone disagrees with us on those underlying issues, we aren’t puzzled or fascinated or motivated to gather evidence and make our case more clearly. We get mad. We feel violated. What kind of villains are we dealing with here?

This week I’m going to try to tease out a few of those issues and see how they play out in immigration and in the Tea Party. Maybe in future Sifts I’ll think about how to get a conversation started.

The Law. Where does the Law get its authority?

In one view, the Law comes from Beyond. Maybe it was ordained by God. Maybe evolution has encoded it in our genes. Maybe the Universe is set up in such a way that only one kind of society really works. For whatever reason, the True Law exists in some place that we can’t touch. The statutes written in our law books deserve our allegiance only to the extent that they mirror this “natural” law. Arguments about social good miss the point, because it doesn’t matter who gains or loses. The Law is the Law.

In the other view, the Law is a social contract. We obey it because it protects us, and we obey the parts that work to our personal disadvantage because overall a lawful society works to everyone’s advantage. Or at least it should. But if the-Law-as-a-whole works against you — say, by making you a slave or trying to wipe out your people — it loses its hold on you. Law-makers (and all citizens in a democracy) are obligated to offer everyone as fair a contract as possible. To the extent that the Law fails that test, it loses its authority.

That sounds very abstract, but look at illegal immigration through these two lenses. Picture a young Mexican couple living in poverty under a corrupt government, seeing no opportunity for a better life no matter how hard they work. Across some invisible line in the desert is America and all that America represents.

What’s their obligation to the American law that would keep them out? If the Law is the Law, if “there is no authority except what God has established,” then they become villains the instant they set foot our country. But if the Law is a social contract, when did they consent to that contract and what benefit have they ever received from it? In that view their obligations to American law begin after they get here, when the Law begins to protect and benefit them. We may choose to enforce the Law on border-jumpers for our own purposes, the same way that we might chase crows out of our corn. But the crows aren’t villains; they just don’t participate in the system that declares the corn to be ours.

Punishment. Conservatives believe instinctively that if something has gone wrong, someone should be punished. (Except possibly the rich.) That urge to punish after 9-11 provided the energy for our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it forms the resistance to “amnesty” for illegal immigrants: Illegal immigration causes problems, so we have to punish someone. I haven’t seen the numbers, but I’ll bet there’s a huge correlation between people’s opposition to amnesty and the importance of Hell in their religion.

The People. Tea Party types are constantly talking about the American People: Government should listen to the People. Government has turned its back on the People. The People need to take their country back.

But who are “the People”?

“The People” is a code whose meaning is mostly unconscious: “The People” are straight white Christians. Straight white Christians voted for McCain/Palin by a wide margin, particularly in rural areas and in the South, the center of Tea Party activity. And yet somehow they have wound up being governed by Barack Obama, who is not white and whose Christianity they find suspect.

Clearly America has ceased to be a democracy, because “the People” no longer rule.

Straight white Christians were such a large majority for so long that they got used to the idea that they are America. But they can’t defend that point consciously, so they have to make up all kinds of nonsense about Obama to justify their feelings. They deny up and down that it’s really about race, and most of them even believe it.

Look at the article A Stranger in Our Midst by a retired polysci professor. It appeared Thursday on a fairly popular right-wing blog and was recounted at length by Rush Limbaugh. Its tone is not angry or hateful; this is a thoughtful person trying to get to the bottom of his discontent — and failing. He’s trying to put his finger on what feels wrong about “the Obama administration and its congressional collaborators” and concludes that they feel like “a foreign occupying force”. But of course “It is not about Obama’s birthplace. It is not about race, either;” it’s about his “outsider values”.

And the evidence for these “outsider values”? The author can’t bring himself to endorse the Birther nonsense outright, so he points to Obama’s “hazy personal background”, his “enduring friendship” with Bill Ayers, his “bowing to foreign potentates“, the health-care bill that “consumes one-sixth of our GDP” and will result in a “swarm” of “recently hired IRS agents“, the idea that community activism or its long-dead strategist Saul Alinsky are somehow un-American or anti-American, or that Obama has now “sided with illegal aliens over the State of Arizona”. This stuff has been debunked repeatedly: It’s all either made up, wildly exaggerated, similar to what previous presidents did, or just plain wacky. (Has Cuban-American Tea Party hero Marco Rubio also sided with illegal aliens against Arizona? What about Jeb Bush?)

The fact that Nancy Pelosi represents San Francisco — rather than someplace in America — “exacerbates the strangeness.” And somehow it is Obama’s personal responsibility that trust in government has been falling for decades in all industrial democracies.
Why all the nonsense, even among people who ought to know better? Obama generates these feelings because he symbolizes an unthinkable fact: In the 21st century straight white Christians (particularly in the South and in rural areas) are out of touch with America. America is now a country where racial minorities, religious minorities, feminists, gays, urban cosmopolitans, and various other once-out-of-the-mainstream groups now constitute a sizable majority. They are America now, as much as anybody is.

But that explanation is unacceptable, so there has to be another one — anything, no matter how stupid.

Oil Spill
I’m reluctant to say much about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, because it continues to expand and we don’t know how bad it will get. It’s still a day-to-day story, not a weekly. TPM has a good summary of how the crisis has unfolded and collects some spectacular photos.

But already this much is becoming clear: When we drill in water this deep, we’re just counting on something like this not happening. Now that it has happened, there is no plan. Even the “experts” are flying by the seat of their pants.

[Full disclosure: I own stock in Transocean, the company that leased the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to BP. All the corporations involved are already pointing fingers at each other. Transocean built the rig, Halliburton installed it, BP operated it — any or all of them may be at fault. In classic corporate PR style, Transocean’s web site began its discussion of the 11 deaths — including 9 Transocean employees — like this: “Of the 126-member crew, 115 were safely evacuated.”]

Best lines. Brad Johnson, on the approval of the Cape Wind offshore wind farm:

I’m worried about all those wind turbines blowing up and leaving a wind-slick on the coast of Cape Cod.

David Letterman (via Politico Playback):

The good news is that they think now that the oil spill will be diluted by the melting ice caps.

Jimmy Kimmel (also from Politico Playback):

This is exactly why I keep saying that America must end its dependence on domestic oil. … Right? Let’s just buy the stuff from countries that hate us. If it spills on them, good!

Jay Leno (also from Politico Playback):

The oil companies are promising to clean this whole mess up. And believe me, if you’ve ever been to a gas station restroom, you know how good they are at cleaning up messes.

Bill Mahr (at about the 1 minute mark of the first video):

I’m mad at the people who go “Drill, baby, drill.” And by the way, they should turn up on the Gulf Coast and start cleaning up the birds with their “Drill, Baby, Drill” t-shirts.

Grist collects conservative comments on the spill.

Guest Workers

Now that we’ve started talking about comprehensive immigration reform again, the idea of a guest-worker program has resurfaced. It’s usually presented as a common-sense, middle-of-the-road idea that shouldn’t be controversial.

And yes, having guest workers with some legitimate legal status would be an improvement on illegal immigrants who are shut out of our legal system, can’t complain if they’re abused, and are afraid to seek treatment when they get sick. (Imagine if H1N1 really had been the great plague the epidemiologists are worried about. How do you vaccinate or quarantine people whose existence you can only guess at?)

But if we need more workers (which is debatable considering our unemployment rate), why shouldn’t we bring in people who will become citizens eventually?

Ever since capitalism and democracy started cohabiting, capitalists have dreamed of a labor force that can’t vote. That may be great for capitalism, but it’s bad for democracy. Bringing people in to do our dirtiest jobs and then sending them home undermines a core American value: the dignity of work. If working to keep American society going doesn’t earn you a stake in that society, then what does?

A program that brings in temporary workers only makes sense if the need for those workers is temporary. If our citizens were mobilized to fight a World-War-II type war, then I could see bringing in workers that we expected to send home when the war was over. If we needed more workers at the peak of an economic boom and we expected those jobs to go away in the next recession, then I could see temporary workers. One-of-a-kind jobs where we need to import a particular specialist for a few years, fine. But if our society has a long-term need for people to pick our vegetables, sweep our floors, watch our children, and mow our lawns, then why shouldn’t those roles be filled by long-term residents who eventually become citizens and vote?

The only answer I can see is either that we don’t respect those roles, or we don’t respect the racial/ethnic groups who come to this country to fill those roles. Neither position is anything to be proud of.
Major newspapers apparently don’t fact-check their op-eds at all these days, so you have to read them very carefully. Example: Thursday’s NYT had an op-ed defending Arizona’s immigration law written by Kris Kobach the former John Ashcroft aide who apparently wrote the law. The article rebutted several criticisms, including that the law “will allow police to engage in racial profiling.”

No, no, no, Kobach writes.

Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status.

The link goes to the text of the law. If you chase it, though, you might notice that the end of the sentence is “except to the extent allowed by the United States and Arizona constitution.”

In other words, an official may consider race, color, or national origin to the full extent allowed by the state and federal constitutions. Since a mere statute can’t over-rule a constitution anyway, this is as far as the Arizona legislature can possibly go to allow racial profiling, not to ban it.

Arizona swiftly passed a revision of the law — also apparently written by Kobach — to blunt some of the most unanswerable criticism. But it doesn’t help much. For example, the word “solely” is taken out of the sentence quoted above. If the sentence had protected anybody to begin with, it would protect more people now. But, as I note above, the “except” clause at the end makes its apparent protections meaningless, then and now.

Atlantic’s senior editor Ta-Nehisi Coates deserves to be quoted at length:

Defenders of the law will say that police still have to stop you for something, and they still have to “suspect” that you did something. Forgive, but I don’t find that comforting. Amadou Diallo is dead because the police “suspected” he was drawing a gun. Oscar Grant is dead because the police “suspected” he needed to be tased. My old friend, Prince Jones, Howard University student and father of a baby girl, was murdered by the police in front of his daughter’s home because police “suspected” he was a drug-dealer. (The cop was not kicked off the force.) Only a year ago, I was stopped in Chelsea, coming from an interview with NPR, because police “suspected” I was the Latino male who’d recently robbed someone. … I don’t want to be cheap here, but it needs to said that when you actually know decent people who are dead because of our insane drug war, your perspective on police power changes. This is a multi-million dollar lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone is going to get killed. And the fact that “the vast majority of police are awesome” will not bring them back.

Chickens For Check-Ups

Nevada senate candidate Sue Lowden has taken a lot of heat for her chickens for check-ups suggestion that you barter with your doctor, and she deserves it. But the problem with her thinking is more serious than just the ridiculous image of chickens in the doctor’s office.

Let’s give Lowden the full benefit of the doubt. Within a small town or a close-knit church community, maybe a doctor who knows you and understands your financial problems would give your kid a check-up in exchange for … OK, not a chicken, but piano lessons or car repair or some other bit of barter.

So what? Healthy people paying for check-ups isn’t the real problem in health care. That’s not what pushes so many people into bankruptcy. The problem is how you’ll pay if they find something seriously wrong with you. What are you going to barter to get kidney dialysis or chemotherapy or the 24/7 care your dad might need in the late stages of Alzheimer’s?

Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope maximum-cost calculation: There are about 300 million Americans. Suppose we all get a check-up every year (which we don’t). Say that a simple check-up without lab tests costs $200. That’s $60 billion a year. In any other context $60 billion is a lot of money, but as a nation we spend more than $2 trillion on health care each year — more than $7,000 per person.

In other words, even if doctors would agree to make check-ups free, it wouldn’t put a dent in the overall cost of health care. So even without the silly imagery, Lowden’s talk about negotiating with your doctor is just a distraction. Like all the other Republican health-care “solutions”, it’s not on the same scale as the problem.

Here’s what you’re up against when you back an argument with statistics: Conservative think tanks get unlimited amounts of corporate funding to fuzz things up. For example, I just mentioned the large number of medical bankruptcies. Well, that’s a myth, say researchers at the Fraser Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. If medical expenses were causing American bankruptcies, the bankruptcy rate in Canada (where they have socialized medicine) would be much lower. In fact, the Canadian bankruptcy rate in 2006 and 2007 was higher than our rate.

Take that, Obamabot socialists!

Well, not so fast. Maybe our bankruptcy rate was lower in 2006 and 2007 because we changed our laws in 2005 to make bankruptcy much harder to declare. The Rabble News Service checked, and it turns out that 2006 and 2007 were the only two recent years when Canada had a higher bankruptcy rate. For the six years before the 2005 law took effect, our rate was about 75% higher than Canada’s. And by 2008, it was back to being higher.

Hmmm. I wonder why the conservative think tanks didn’t notice that.
Short Notes

This good summary of where the economy is comes from The Big Picture blog. The gist: recovery, but still a spotty and sluggish one.

If you have a decent broadband connection, you can watch Nova online whenever you want. Check out their Mind Over Money episode about the role of emotion in markets. If you design the rules cleverly, people will bid $28 for a $20 bill, markets will assign a positive value to securities everybody knows are worthless, and much much more.

Matt Yglesias sums up Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson’s position on financial reform:

So he wanted the same thing Berkshire wanted, and he owns shares in Berkshire, and Berkshire is located in his home state, and he filibustered the bill, but he didn’t filibuster the bill because of Berkshire’s concerns. It’s just a big coincidence. Now we’re clear.

A site worth paying attention to is the Sunlight Foundation, whose motto is “Transparency in Government”. (The mission statement fleshes that out a little: “The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable.”) They have a blog and a press center.

Their Revolving Door From Capitol Hill to Big Banks article is worth reading. It discusses the 145 former government employees who are currently working as lobbyists for the six biggest banks. If you ever wonder why not even retiring congressmen seem to have much independence from the special interests, that’s why. A congressman who plays ball can retire into a lucrative lobbying career. It’s perfectly legal, because nothing so gauche as a bribe is necessary. A former colleague stops by for a chat and lets you know how well Goldman Sachs pays him to do nothing more than wander around chatting with people. You get the message.

Thanks to Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Roman goddess on the state seal will no longer expose her breast.

Lest you think that the Arizona immigration law is an aberration: They just passed another law banning ethnic studies programs and preventing teachers with “heavy accents” from teaching English. Back in the 90s Arizona recruited a lot of Spanish-speaking teachers for bilingual education, but then in 2000 the voters passed a referendum banning bilingual ed. Now the plan seems to be to force out the teachers who managed to get absorbed into the English-only program.

And lest you think Arizona has a monopoly on crazy, TPM collects nutty legislation introduced or passed in other states. My favorites: California, Wisconsin, and North Dakota have passed laws against the forced implantation of microchips in human beings, in spite of the fact that this seems only to happen in paranoid fantasies. And in Georgia you can now carry your licensed firearms into airports, all the way up to the security check-point where the feds take over. If there’s a shoot-out in front of the Cinnabon, wouldn’t you hate to be left out?

Viral video: Soldiers in Afghanistan remake Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video.

You can get the Sift every week via email. Subscribe by writing to weeklysift AT gmail.com

May 3, 2010 – 3:06 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment

Bilking People

Unless your business model depends on bilking people, there is little to fear from these new rules. 
— President Barack Obama, 

In this week's Sift:

  • Glenn Beck is Conspiring with God. I was debating whether to go public with my hunch that Fox News is turning into a cult. And then Glenn Beck announced: “God is giving a plan to me.”
  • Arizona's Occupied Territories. The new immigration law is going to isolate police, not illegal immigrants.
  • The Creativity of Goldman Sachs. It no longer goes without saying that business creativity is a good thing.
  • Short Notes. Anderson Cooper discovers the existence of facts. Jon Stewart's feud with Fox goes gospel. White privilege and the Tea Party. Why Lindsey Graham must be gay. And more.
Glenn Beck is Conspiring With God

When I wrote that piece about Fox News last week (The Doublethink Network), I thought about writing a longer piece where that incident was just one example of a larger shift at Fox: They used to be a propaganda network, but recently they've been acting more like a cult. I decided that thesis was too speculative and too based on my own subjective impressions, so it didn't make the cut. But Tuesday brought an even better example, so I'm going to run with it.

Here's the distinction I had in mind: Propaganda is about winning arguments in the larger community, while cultism is about walling yourself off from the larger community. Propaganda is designed to compete with other news sources, but cults aim for a controlled environment where the world is shut out and the audience will only hear one voice.

As a result, propagandists are careful with their lies. When I was a student, I used to practice my German by occasionally picking up the East German paper Neues Deutschland, which the university bookstore carried for some reason. I never caught them in a lie (not that I tried very hard). Instead, they created their illusions through selection and omission. 

ND's stories about the United States, for example, were all true: They wrote about serial killers, inner-city neighborhoods being destroyed by drugs, hungry children in poor rural areas, political corruption scandals, and so on. They made the U.S. sound like a hell-hole, but they did it by carefully spooning out the truth. (This is one of the most misunderstood features of the Big Lie technique. The Big Lie is not just audacious, it's conceptually big, like the idea that America is a hell-hole or that the Jews betrayed Germany in World War I. No single fact can refute it. The smaller and more observable the fact, the more truthful the propagandist needs to be. So you can get away with calling Obama a Communist, but you can't get away with calling him fat.)

Now, I doubt there was ever a period where Fox was quite that circumspect; they've always lied to a certain extent. But the main thrust of their propaganda has been selection and omission. They took quotes out of context. They emphasized stories that supported their worldview and minimized stories that didn't. They provided an uncritical platform for other people to lie. But the lies Fox told directly were usually at a higher level: Through selection and omission, they assembled baseless and fanciful stories.

A propagandist behaves that way because an observable lie creates a vulnerability. The propagandist has competition, and he'll lose to that competition if they can expose him telling clear lies.

When a propagandist does get caught in a lie, he wants the story to go away and be forgotten. So the #1 defense is just to go on: Find another bright and shiny story for your audience to jump to. If you can't get away that, you fog the story up: Roll your eyes and imply that your critics are lying without accusing them of anything specific. (“That liberal media, what else can you expect?”) Or you can exaggerate and distort the accusations made against you, expand the target, and then be outraged by the distortions you just projected onto your critics. (“How dare they compare our troops to the Nazis!”) If you think you can't even get away with that, your last resort is to admit the error, but deny any bad intent. (When Sean Hannity was caught switching tapes to exaggerate the size of a health care protest rally, he said it was “an inadvertent mistake”.)

What you don't do is bring the issue to a sharper point, implicitly admit that what you're accused of saying was  a lie, and claim that you never said it even though it's on tape and your audience probably remembers you saying it anyway. That's the behavior I was describing last week in Bill O'Reilly. (Commenter DavidWinSF expands the point to the larger conservative movement, pointing to John McCain saying “I never considered myself a maverick.“)

That's cult behavior — a bald reality-is-what-I-say-it-is claim.

Subjectively, I think I've been seeing more of it than I used to. If I had to put a beginning date on it, two events stand out: Obama's election and the rise of Glenn Beck over the earlier Fox stars like O'Reilly and Hannity. I think they're related: The failure of Bush and Obama's election created the conditions for Beck to come into his own. 

Pre-Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly were propagandists. They were charismatic (Hannity) and avuncular (O'Reilly) proponents of a pre-existing conservatism. There is no unique Hannity worldview or O'Reilly worldview. They got their talking points from elsewhere, and they ran with them.

Beck is different. What Beck offers is not conservative spin, but occult knowledge. There is a hidden order to the world, one that only Glenn Beck has been able to figure out. Often his reasoning sounds more like The DaVinci Code than like the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation. He interprets symbols no one else is paying attention to (Beck here, rational response here), finds a sinister conspiracy in a public alliance of labor and environmental groups to promote green jobs, and even reads significance into random assemblages of letters. (South Park parody here.)

That's on TV. His radio show (Premiere, not Fox) is even wiggier. And that brings me to the example that convinced me to go ahead and write this. Tuesday (audio, partial transcript) Beck started talking about a caller who asked him to just put out his “plan”. He says he's working on it. But then he says something more: He's not working on it, he's getting it from God.

The problem, I think, is that God is giving a plan to me that is not really a plan. … The problem is that I think the plan that the Lord would have us follow is hard for people to understand. … Because of my track record with you, I beg of you to help me get this message out, and I beg of you to pray for clarity on my part. The plan that He would have me articulate, I think, to you is “Get behind me.” And I don’t mean me, I mean Him. “Get behind Me. Stand behind Me.”

Beck goes on to talk about the Founders. His impression of them is that they knew God was acting through them and so they just got out of the way and let Him work. (I wonder what Beck's supposed hero Thomas Paine — author of the skeptical classic The Age of Reason — would think about that.)

They just stood where they were supposed to stand and they said the things that they were supposed to say as He directed. … But that’s what He’s asking us to do is to stand peacefully, quietly, with anger, quiet with anger, loudly with truth. 

Faith is the answer. Get on your knees, don’t let it take a September 11th, get on your knees, please, I don’t care what church you go to, no church at all, I don’t care. Turn to Him.

This is the most popular guy on Fox, the one the others are starting to imitate. He is the biggest single influence on the Tea Party crowd, the biggest difference between them and Americans who are otherwise demographically identical.

And he's not a propagandist. He's a cult leader.

An earlier version of this article drew some comment on Daily Kos.

Arizona's Occupied Territories

Our news media serves us worst when emotions are running high. This week I saw a lot of coverage of Arizona's harsh new law targeting illegal immigrants, both before and after Governor Brewer signed it Friday. But coverage focused mostly on fear: Hispanics' fear of a Gestapo-type regime where legitimate citizens and legal aliens will have to carry documentation at all times, and white Arizonans' fear about violent crime near the border.

So while it was easy to find discussion of the bill, it was comparatively hard to figure out what it would actually do, and what Arizona law has been like up until now. Wikipedia does a good job here, and the Christian Science Monitor notes: 

Currently, officers can inquire about a person’s immigration status only if that person is a suspect in another crime.

The text of the law expands this to require an immigration status inquiry during “any lawful contact” with a police officer if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the United States illegally. Guidelines for “reasonable suspicion” haven't been issued yet. Governor Brewer says “racial profiling is illegal.” But whether they call it racial profiling or not, no one doubts that this law will result in Hispanic citizens being hassled in situations where whites would be left alone.  

Brewer refused to get pinned down about what would raise police suspicion, saying “I do not know what an illegal immigrant looks like.” But the bill's main sponsor admits that appearance “certainly may be a factor.” And another supporting legislator told Chris Matthews that police 

will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of—right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes.

Translation: Professional-class Hispanics who keep their appearance up to snuff don't have to worry (unless they run into cops who just want to hassle them — which happens). But if you're brown-skinned and like to wander around in jeans and t-shirts, then you'd better carry documentation.

And that's where I lose the drift. If the bill has any justification at all, it's one of those difficult trade-offs between liberty and safety — complicated by the fact that the people who are hoping for more safety (whites) are different from the people being asked to accept less liberty (Hispanics). But if the problem is Mexican drug violence crossing the border, I don't see how this helps. I'm sure cartel hitmen can afford to dress well.

Let's back up and look at the immigration problem a little more abstractly. In general, law is strongest when both morality and community are on its side. Murder laws, for example, are uncontroversial because people generally agree that murder is wrong and that murderers have gone beyond the pale. We're happy to have the law stand between us and the murderers.

But law is weakest when morality and community pull against it. If people like me are being arrested for things that don't seem wrong to me, then I'm going to cooperate with police as little as I can. Maybe I'd turn in my brother if he were a murderer (like David Kaczynski turned in his brother when he realized that Ted was the Unabomber), but if all he did was come to America looking to work hard and make a better life for himself and his family … well, that's a little different. If the law forces me to choose, it may not like the choice I make.

That's why so many local police (with a few exceptions) have been content to let immigration be a federal problem. They want the Hispanic community to see them as protectors, not as enemies. They want the community's cooperation in solving murders, thefts, and other unambiguous crimes — precisely the sort of crimes that Arizona's white community claims to be up in arms about.

But that's not an option any more in Arizona if this law get enforced (which is doubtful). “Any lawful contact” means not just with suspects, but with victims and witnesses as well. So if a murderer walks into your bar and you call the police, then every poorly dressed Hispanic in the room is going to have his immigration status checked. Maybe it's not worth it.

In poor Hispanic neighborhoods, the likely result is that police will be isolated, not illegal immigrants. These neighborhoods may come to resemble occupied territories like the West Bank or the Sunni Triangle before the Surge. The police will be a (largely) white occupation army, enforcing white law on a community of locals who are automatically suspected of being in league with the bad guys. In such an environment the real bad guys — soldiers of the Mexican drug cartels — will hide more easily.

Policing an occupied territory is expensive, and the bill does not give local police any new funding. Like most states, Arizona is looking at a serious budget deficit.

That deficit will get worse if there is an economic boycott of Arizona. (I know I've vacationed in Sedona in the past, but Santa Fe is a nice place too.) The most interesting boycott question concerns Major League Baseball, where about 1/3 of the players are Hispanic and about half the teams have spring-training camps in Arizona. The 2011 All Star Game is currently slated for Phoenix. Will Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols be there? With documentation?

Stephen Colbert:

It's like they're saying that harassing Latinos with racial profiling is an inevitable side-effect of this law. It's not. It's the entire point of this law.

The Creativity of Goldman Sachs
I assume you have heard that the government is suing Goldman Sachs for fraud. The gist of the case is this: A hedge fund manager wanted to bet against the housing bubble, so he helped Goldman pull mortgages likely to fail into one big security (a CDO) which he could then sell short. Goldman then marketed the security without telling investors that it had been designed to fail by someone betting against it. (If it helps, the story has been set to music.)
Securities law is complicated enough that Goldman could get off, even if it did everything the SEC claims. But the case both cause and symbol of a deeper change in the public discussion. Until very recently (even after the 2008 financial meltdown) the conventional wisdom has stuck by the idea that regulation is a drag on economic growth because it “stifles business creativity” or some such thing. If government regulation caused bank profits to go down, that would be the expected bad result.
Lately, though, it has become OK to say in public that the financial sector is parasitic, and that a decline in financial-sector profits might be a good thing. That may seem obvious, but the idea seldom appeared in mainstream publications until about a year ago when The Atlantic published “The Quiet Coup“: an IMF economist putting forward the thesis that “recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform.” In his recent book Freefall, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes:

An outsized financial sector's profits may come at the expense of the prosperity and efficiency of the rest of the economy.

And Paul Krugman added a week ago:

the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.

Increasingly, it looks like financial products became complicated not to meet the demands of a complex world, but because complicated products create more opportunities for fraud and various legal forms of bamboozlement. The government should encourage engineers and artists to be creative, but it should discourage the creativity of con-men. Financial creativity can go either way, which is why it needs regulation.
What's remarkable isn't the opinion, but that respectable people will say it out loud now.
Short Notes

This was a great week for political humor and satire. One of the week's funniest clips was intended to be serious: Anderson Cooper interviewed Arizona state legislator Cecil Ash who pushed the so-called “birther amendment” demanding that future presidential candidates produce a birth certificate before getting on the ballot. Cooper scorches Ash, to the point that the whole interview is LOL funny. When Ash claims “nobody can deny that there's been a controversy” about President Obama's birth and citizenship, Cooper responds: “There's a controversy about everything … but there are things called facts.”

Jon Stewart's feud with Fox News is getting hilariously out of hand. It started on Tax Day, when Stewart began by agreeing with Fox talking heads' assessment that the media was stereotyping the Tea Party, but then switched to a series of clips of the same talking heads stereotyping liberals. That led up to Jon's conclusion: “Go f**k yourselves.”

Well, Bernie Goldberg counter-attacked on Bill O'Reilly's show.

If you want to be a good [social commentator], you'd better find some guts. … You're not nearly as edgy as you think you are. You're just a safe Jay Leno with a much smaller audience. 

Stewart's answer Tuesday culminated with an appearance of the Go F**k Yourself Gospel Choir.

If you've had trouble explaining (or understanding) the concept of white privilege, a good place to start is Tim Wise's article “Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? 

For that matter, imagine hundreds of armed HIspanics marching on Phoenix threatening revolution if the new Arizonan immigration law is enforced. Are they patriotic Americans defending their rights against a rapacious government, or something less savory?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. … And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do on a daily basis.

An anti-immigration activist knows why Lindsey Graham doesn't side with him: The Left must be blackmailing Graham by threatening to out him as gay. And Stephen Colbert responds: “If Lindsey Graham found men sexually attractive, why would he hang out with Joe Lieberman?”

Here's a legal fine point the Christian Legal Society is trying to sell the Supreme Court: It's wrong to discriminate against blacks or women because you're bigoted against them, but if you just honestly believe they're inferior, that's different.

April 26, 2010 – 2:00 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Post a comment