Last week, Francis Pusok was badly beaten by ten sheriff’s deputies in San Bernardino. I’m sure the deputies will claim that they were very, very afraid. It seems that police officers spend their entire lives in great fear. There is apparently no more cowardly group of people than police officers. Now it seems that just about every group that can investigate this beating is. Of course, that’s only because there was video of it. If there hadn’t been, it would be ten sheriff’s deputies’ word against a known horse thief. We’ve seen this play out before — in fact, we see it every day.

This incident is an interesting companion to Michael Slager’s killing of Walter Scott. What most struck me in that video was how calm Slager was. There was no emotion. Even putting down a rabid dog would elicit more emotion in most people. I’m sure that it never occurred to Slager that anyone would question what he was doing. And I doubt that Slager saw what he was doing as outside his job description. Scott ran from Slager. How dare he?! What disrespect! And if Scott had gotten away, he might have gone on to miss another child support payment! Slager was just doing his job.

But in an important sense, that’s true. Slager was just doing his job. He was doing what we Americans seem to think is right and fitting. Sure, we don’t like to be reminded of it so graphically. But this is what we want. I am still haunted by a segment I saw on The Last Word. (If anyone has the link to it, please let me know.) It was after one of the many highly publicized police shootings. But this was video of a couple of police officers trying to deal with a clearly mentally disturbed man who had a knife. Eventually, the officers killed the man. And Lawrence O’Donnell presented it as the police doing a good job.

You see, the officers did try to reason with the man. And they spent a fair amount of time before killing the man. But the whole thing shocked me. That was good police work? That is what we owe to the mentally disabled? I don’t think so. There are actually a lot of ways that a crazy man with a knife could be dealt with. Of course, that isn’t the job the police. They are trained to deal with normal criminals. It’s not surprising that they saw that their only choice was to kill this man.

The question is why it is that the police were called to deal with this situation. Everyone else in the area was gone. The only potential victims were the police officers. Why police officers? Why not, I don’t know, mental health professionals? I am not a mental health professional myself, but I imagine two guys dressed in white with a big net like something out of cartoon. That would have been a more effective response to that situation. I’m sure there are much better still.

Ta-Nehisi Coates dealt with this issue in an article yesterday, The Myth of Police Reform. He noted that we spend too much time talking about what exactly a police officer did and was thinking rather than asking the more profound question, “Why was the officer even there?” Walter Scott is dead because we have the criminal justice system deal with child support issues instead of the more reasonable choice of social workers.

So we have three layers. We have the officers themselves — the focus of our concern, but actually the least important aspect of our problems. We have the police agencies themselves, which really are a major problem all by themselves. But the overriding problem is our wish to make all problems about criminal justice. I doubt we will do anything about it, however. We Americans are a very fearful and simplistic people.

I have never understood Marco Rubio’s appeal. To me, he’s a typical white as paste Republican. But given that he is a Cuban American, the Republicans can claim that he is a Latino and so he shows that the party has diversity. As it is, he got into the Senate because of a three-way race during a very pro-Republican year. He embarrassed himself when he gave the response to the State of the Union address. And his efforts at being a “reform” Republican were a total failure, despite being tepid. Above all, I see him as a man-boy: he seems like he ought to be the president of the college Young Republicans club.

It is possible that Rubio could catch on with the public. But at this point, I think he is mostly a big deal because he’s a Republican who the mainstream media can paint as a moderate. Of course, he is anything but. He’s a global warming denier. He’s against same sex marriage. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act — but of course he claimed that he wanted to vote for it but there was just this one thing that he couldn’t abide. He’s against relations with Cuba. And of course he’s virulently anti-choice and very much pro-gun. If the mainstream media reported on his policies accurately, he would never have a chance. But what are the odds that the mainstream media is going to be interested in his policy positions?

On Monday, Brian Beutler wrote, Marco Rubio Is the Most Disingenuous Republican Running for President. You see, the Republicans understand that all else being equal, they will lose any presidential election. The truth is that the Democrats are just more popular than the Republicans. So various candidates are looking for ways to seem more friendly to the middle class. They don’t want to be seen as candidates of the rich — the way that Mitt Romney was.

Back a year ago, Jonathan Chait wrote, I Have Seen the Future of the Republican Party, and It Is George W Bush. He argued that the Republicans were going to abandon their obsession with deficits and start spending like it was 2001. There was never any question of that. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans never care about the budget when they are in power. And so Rubio is following this plan. Last year, he put together a tax plan that, unlike previous Republican plans, would actually help the middle class. Of course, that’s what Bush said. When the plan came out, it added $2.4 trillion to the federal debt over ten years. And it consisted mostly of tax cuts for the rich with some “modest middle class benefits” thrown in. But apparently, even this was too little for the plutocrats.

So Rubio came out with another plan. The new plan includes even more benefits for the rich. This includes the elimination of capital gains taxes and the inheritance tax. Rubio may be young, but his ideas are just a recycling of what Republicans always want to do. It’s interesting that Michael Gerson was praising Rubio’s “new ideas” and complaining that all Democrats want to do is push old ideas like raising the minimum wage to the level it was in 1969. Meanwhile, one of the big “new ideas” of the Republicans is to get rid of the minimum wage altogether. I’m looking forward to other “new ideas” like the 78 hour work week.

What we can depend on from Marco Rubio is that he will go right along with the conservative movement. Unlike liberals, conservatives aren’t expected to have “Sister Souljah moments.” Because the media will pretend that extremists like Rubio are actually moderates. There is really nothing ideologically that separates Rubio from Ted Cruz. But I’d actually rather have Cruz as a president. At least he is able to think for himself. Rubio is just another Republican automaton. He’s a Young Republican, all grown up.

Last week I reported, Congressional Democrats Plot to Kill Iran Deal. It included a picture of the ever slappable Chuck Schumer. Well, now it has come to pass, although it isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. According to Reuters, In Setback, Obama Concedes Congress Role on Iran Deal. Before I get to the deal, let me just note how annoying this is. There are all kinds of things that the Congressional Democrats could have decided to stand up to Obama on: drones, NSA, Libya. But this is what they care about: a deal that is shaping up to be great for the west — far better than could have been expected. And this is what they stand up for. Let’s hope they show similar steel when it comes to fast tracking the TPP.

So this little law will give Congress 30 days to look over the deal. During that time, Obama will not be able to stop some portion of the sanctions against Iran. And the administration will be mandated to send regular “detailed” reports about “Iran’s support for terrorism, ballistic missiles, and nuclear program.” So really, all this law is doing is messing around with the administration. It is a symbolic vote for these idiots to say, “We’re strong! We only believe in bombing campaigns! Heil Netanyahu!”

A lot of people are talking about the fact that if a Republican wins the presidential election in 2016, all this will come to an end on 20 January 2017. But there is just one thing. The rest of the world isn’t as crazy and spiteful as the Republican Party specifically and the American people more broadly. Germany, France, and the rest are still going to lift sanctions. All the United States is doing by acting so stupidly is isolating itself. I’ve long maintained that the day is coming — perhaps even in my lifetime when the rest of the world is going to have to go to war against a fascist United States. And make no mistake: that is what this is about. For the Republicans and many of the Democrats, this is about thinking that America can have anything it wants by sending troops and dropping bombs.

But this latest bit of “legislating” just hammers home the point that Congress can’t do anything. This is just another symbolic measure. It also shows that the only time that the Republicans and the Democrats can get along with each other is when they acting stupidly and making things worse. I still expect the Iran deal to go through. But according to Reuters, “European officials have said that worries about a possible spoiler role for Congress have undermined the US delegation’s credibility in the talks and raised questions about the Obama administration’s ability to deliver on commitments.” So there is no doubt that this is making things harder.

Where are the Democrats and the Republicans demanding to know what is in the TPP? Where is the outrage about even considering allowing it to be rammed through Congress? Could it be that Chuck Schumer has a whole bunch of Wall Street funders who really want this deal? Could it be that Schumer is not alone? Could it be that our government is bought and paid for by corporate interests? Does voting even matter? We will find out very soon. And I’m not hopeful.

God’s older brother, Ross Douthat, was at The New York Times last week to explain why it is that laws against same sex marriage aren’t the same as miscegenation laws of the past. And the reason is, “This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country.” As you may be aware, Douthat has given up the culture war and just wants to be allowed to sit in his room praying and cursing the godless sinners who will burn in hell. Oh wait! He already has that right. He wants to be able to talk about this stuff in public and still get invited to Ezra Klein’s parties.

But I have to say, I really don’t understand Douthat’s reasoning here. He’s saying that discrimination should be allowed because not that many people would actually discriminate. Since the question is no longer whether same sex couples should be able to marry but rather whether bigot bakers should be able to refuse to put two male figures on the top of a wedding cake, the state has no right to interfere. But let’s suppose that a same sex couple lives in a small town where there is only one baker and she hates her some homos. To this couple, it doesn’t matter that there are thousands of bakers elsewhere who have no problem with same sex marriage.

Let’s think back to the miscegenation laws. It didn’t matter in 1966 that a mixed race couple in Mississippi could marry in New York. In fact, in 1966, mixed racial couples could marry in 33 states. By Douthat’s logic, Loving v Virginia — that case that found miscegenation laws unconstitutional — was not necessary. What’s more, we could get rid of the public accommodations clause in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, since at this point there wouldn’t be that many hotels that would discriminate.

But is this all just about a “handful of shops across the country”? Is it really true that this isn’t part of a “society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow”? Well, it is certainly the case that the states that are now doing everything they can to oppress the LGBT community are the same ones that were enforcing miscegenation laws. Check out the interactive map of miscegenation laws. Through 1964, Indiana still enforced these laws. And the entire south enforced them until Loving in 1967. What’s more, members of the LGBT community are murdered at an alarming rate. In 2011, 30 were murdered. Being gay is not just a matter of being refused wedding cakes.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR provided a good overview of LGBT oppression in this country, A Non-Conspiracy of Douthat’s. To Douthat’s contention that there is not a “structural system of oppression,” he responded:

Douthat is a smart guy. But reading him over the past couple of years has been very much like reading racist apologists from the 1960s. It starts with claims that the common good is to deprive rights. Then it shifts to claims that it is all just a matter of opinion and sincere people should be allowed to differ. I don’t think that Douthat will ever evolve past this point. As with the bigots of the past, he will just be passed by. But he’ll never lose his post at The New York Times because there aren’t many social conservatives who can communicate in full sentences.