With Barbara Boxer retiring from the Senate after two decades, California is looking at a potentially bad situation in the 2016 Senate race. I am talking about my state’s stupid top two primaries. These are where everyone runs in the primary and then the general election is just a runoff between the top two candidates. The problem with this is that the people can end up with two choices they hate in the general election. And as Jonathan Bernstein noted last week, the risk is even higher for this election.

The problem we have is that California has had two Democratic Senators (Boxer and Dianne Feinstein) since the beginning of 1992. The state is solidly Democratic, even though we have an annoying habit of electing Republican body builders as governors. What that means is that there are a lot of Democrats who want their shots at the Senate. So it is quite possible that the Democratic field will be swamped, allowing two relatively strong Republican candidates to win the primary with 20% each.

This is not just theory. As I discussed last year in California’s Stupid Top Two Primaries, this almost happened in the House of Representatives District 31. In that primary, Republican Paul Chabot got 26.6% of the vote. Democrat Pete Aguilar came in second with 17.4%. He only beat the second most popular Republican by 209 votes. Otherwise, it would have been a two Republican general election. Instead, the general election was between the Democrat and the Republican. And the Democrat won by 3.4 percentage points.

Bernstein explained that the system is supposedly intended to stop extremist candidates from getting in. But of course, it doesn’t work that way at all, “In reality, the rules force parties to game the system by adding an extra tier of pre-‘primary’ endorsements, either formally or informally.” But it also means that just by random chance, we can end up with a system that is profoundly anti-democratic. And this is not just an issue for Democrats. This problem can hurt Republicans in conservative districts. And it reminds me of what people always complained about in the Soviet Union: that people only got to vote for one party.

I think it is unlikely that we will end up with a two-Republican general election for the California Senate. The seat is too important to the Democratic Party and so it will, as Bernstein noted, “game the system.” Of course, this is its own kind anti-democracy. But it is a lot better than the other option. There is one thing that would be good about a two-Republican general election, however: it would mean the end of these top two primaries. I think the people of California would rebel at the idea that they only had two Republicans to choose from. But it would be a damned high price to pay.

This little scan from The New York Times comes via Digby who got it from NYT Archives. The image includes the text, “In large part, the current dispute is the result of the resentment the police feel toward City Hall for what they say is ‘abuse’ they have suffered at the hands of demonstrators and others allegedly encouraged by political leaders. A breakdown of authority is also cited by policemen.” In the text above what I’ve included here is something about not enforcing some laws. It all is very tired, as we have watched the New York City police officers stage their continued hissy fits about how they don’t get no respect.

But as you can probably tell, this is not a report about the current situation. This is a report from 1968. Then as now, it probably has more to do with union contracts than anything else. But, of course, the police can’t come out and say that. They have to claim that somehow they are being oppressed. They just know that they are completely good and no one should ever have cause to complain about them. And their jobs are so dangerous. (Even though they aren’t.) It’s the kind of thinking that comes from members of insular groups. And that’s why all the police grousing isn’t just familiar because we’ve heard it from the police time and time again. We hear it all the time from all kinds of different people.

My favorite example comes from cultural Christians who get ever so upset when a department story decides to say “Happy holidays!” instead of “Merry Christmas!” How dare they include other celebrations in the month of December when everyone knows that Christmas is the only one that matters! Notice what’s going on here. A majority group feels oppressed — not because they are oppressed but simply because minority groups are not oppressed. This is “not being singled out as better than others” as oppression.

There is also the general Fox News conservative lament that conservatives are oppressed. They’ve gotten nothing but one political victory after another for four decades, yet according to them they are oppressed. Is it that their “side” in any debate is ignored or belittled? No. It is that their beliefs are not reported as fact. When Fox News says that it is “fair and balanced,” that is what it means. In the conservative mind, “fair and balanced” means that conservative ideas are taken as The Truth™ and not just the opinion of a minority of the country.

And so it is with the police. I think the worst thing that ever happened to policing in the United States was the invention of the automobile. It separated the police from the people even more than they always were. And they always were. And that is a problem. We see the same thing with, say, the maintenance crew in a large apartment complex. There is a natural sense of “us versus them.” But with police, we have the problem that “us” have the right to kill “them.” And given that police are ultimately public servants, they can’t afford to have that attitude.

In the military, not showing respect for and deference to civilian authority is a firing offense. The police should be the same way. If they want to show up to a funeral out of uniform and snub the mayor, that should be their right. But when they are in uniform, they should have no such right. It makes the police force look like a law unto itself. But I’m sure that this idea has never occurred to the police in their current hissy fit. And that’s because everyone they know thinks the same way. And that’s because everyone they know is also a police officer.

On Wednesday, I published, Je Suis Charlie. And I stand by most of what I wrote. But there was one thing that I wrote that was based upon hearsay rather than actual research, “In the case of Charlie Hebdo, any outrage is totally unjustified because the magazine took on everyone.” It was also based upon the cover illustration to the left that mocked both a Muslim and a Hasidic Jew. But I think there might be a problem with this contention.

Earlier today, Glenn Greenwald wrote, In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons. It is a reaction to a push by many all over the political spectrum who claim that we should celebrate the offending cartoons that supposedly caused the recent massacre of innocents in Paris. It is an interesting and thoughtful analysis of the issue. (Contrast it with Jonathan Chait’s incredibly uninteresting response, Charlie Hebdo Point-Missers Miss Point.) I’m not quite sure where I stand on it. But this part struck me:

I don’t speak French, so I’m not in a position to say. But it made me realize that the cover illustration above may actually indicate the fundamental problem with my own thinking. The problem, as I now see it, is that the Muslim is generic and the Jew is not. The implication is simply “all Muslims and particular Jews.” But I don’t think that this is intentional. It is more along the lines of, “All Japanese look alike!” What such claims actually mean is that the speaker has little experience with Japanese people. (I’ve had this problem myself — cured by years of Japanese cinema watching.)

It is pathetic, of course, that I now feel I must mention that I’m a free speech absolutist. It is not just that it is obviously wrong to kill people for the “offense” of saying things you disagree with. The idea that people should not have the right to encourage draft resistance during a war (“shouting fire in a crowed theater”) is simply ridiculous. Just the same, it is curious, isn’t it, that we do not have such clearly political — First Amendment — rights, but we do have the right to snipe at minority groups in any way that we choose — including “the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors…”

According to Juan Cole, two-thirds of Muslim heritage French people don’t even consider themselves religious — much less “radical.” The problem here is that even among the very small world population of Jews (less than 20 million), we distinguish. But the 1.6 billion Muslims are monolithic for us. And that’s why that Charlie Hebdo cover struck me as fairly even handed (I would have preferred a Christian in there — but intolerance is not limited to any religion or non-religion).

Bigotry is, at base, about classification — treating individuals as members of a group. It is a very big issue that I fight with in myself constantly regarding racism. I fear that many people who, like me, worry about racism, don’t worry about such grouping problems when it comes to religion. After all, people supposedly choose their religions. There are a couple of problems with that. First: people don’t choose their religions. Almost every religious person is a member of the faith they grew up in. Second, as we know only too well, there is very little that can be generalized about a hippy Unitarian and a right-wing evangelical Protestant. The same is true of all people. I’m sure there are even cruel Jains.

I would hate for the tragedy in Paris to leave us with nothing but what we should have always known: people shouldn’t be killed because others find them offensive. Worse still is the idea that this is all about Islam, because if these actions really spoke of the religion, those 1.6 billion Muslims would have forced us to live under a worldwide caliphate by now. I suppose that it is asking too much for everyone to take this as an opportunity to examine themselves. But it really is on all of us non-Muslims, because it isn’t like the terrorists are going to start wearing “gang colors.” And it is wrong to ask Muslims to abandon their heritage so we can better spot those we ought to fear. (Not that it would work, of course.)

We have a another good jobs report out today. We add 252,000 new jobs, the headline unemployment rate is down to 5.6%, and the job gains from the November and December reports were revised upward significantly. People who read this blog should know who ought to get credit for this: no one. As long as you don’t constantly harm an economy, it will eventually heal. This recovery has taken a long time, and we can say who is primary to blame for that: the Republicans in Congress. But the Republicans, of course, do not see it like that.

This last week, Mitch McConnell said that he had noticed a powerful correlation, “After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress. So this is precisely the right time to advance a positive, pro-growth agenda.” Just to be clear, what he means by “pro-growth agenda” is cutting taxes on the rich, allowing corporations to rape the earth, and cutting support for the poor.

McConnell’s remarks have been widely mocked. DNC Communications Director Mo Elleithee said, “Hahahahahahahahahahaha. That Mitch McConnell is one funny guy.” Of course, McConnell isn’t being funny. It is just that conservatives — even many of their so called serious economists — believe in the Confidence Fairy. This is the idea that people aren’t spending because they lack “confidence” and if they just know that the government is doing the “right thing” (translation: what conservatives want the government to do), “confidence” will be restored and the economy will start booming. This is closely tied to the “job creator” myth where the owners of companies don’t hire because they need workers to fulfill demands for their products; instead, the owners hire out of a sense of beneficence or noblesse oblige or the fact that the Republicans control Congress.

You may think that I’m overstating this and that McConnell is just saying such nonsense as a rhetorical flourish. But you would be wrong. You doubtless remember the famous “47 percent” video with Mitt Romney. I never thought that much about what everyone else got so excited about. It simply demonstrated what we already knew about Romney. The truly jaw dropping moment in the video is after one of the millionaire attendees asks how Romney will improve the economy. Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider caught Romney’s response, “My own view is if we win on November 6 there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back and well see — without actually doing anything, we’ll actually get a boost to the economy.”

I’m not sure how the causation works here. Is it that the Republicans have no real ideas on how to improve the economy because they believe that the only thing that is holding back the economy is a lack of “confidence” and things like Obama calling bankers “fat cats”? I think it is more likely the opposite. Republicans are committed to economic policies that help the already rich and not the economy. As a result, they’ve had to look for a justification for doing nothing. Just look at Romney’s campaign. His whole economic plan was to give massive tax cuts to the rich. This was, interestingly, justified with Keynesian theory, which conservatives dismiss any time anyone talks about government stimulus that doesn’t involve tax cuts or military spending.

So McConnell’s recent statement is funny. But he and the rest of the Republican Party are dead serious about this. And there are lots of voters who believe this nonsense. Economic policy doesn’t need to make sense. As we saw during the 1980 election (and every one since then), economic policy just has to sound plausible for voters for them to accept it. But laughing at such claims is probably for the best. We don’t want to end up with more “both sides now” reporting: “Republicans say that the simple fact that they are in power will improve the economy and Democrats say the economy doesn’t work that way. Who can say? I’m just a reporter!”