Oh. My. God! Did you know that Bernie Sanders was pro-gun?! Mark Joseph Stern seemed pretty worked up about it last month, Bernie Sanders, Gun Nut. He wrote then, “But before liberal Democrats flock to Sanders, they should remember that the Vermont senator stands firmly to Clinton’s right on one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base: gun control.” Really?! Is that an issue of overwhelming importance to us? Because I didn’t know that. I thought the Democratic Party had given up on gun control some time in the 1980s.

But okay, Sanders is no kind of gun control fanatic. Just the same, he’s no kind of gun rights fanatic. It’s hard to figure out NRA ratings, but as far as I can tell, Sanders’ NRA grade was F in 2003, D- in 2012, and F now. So let’s think about this. Even if Sanders is inclined toward more gun freedom than the Democratic base, how would it ever matter given the state of not just the Republican Party but the conservative wing of the Democratic Party? What’s more, I don’t think that most Democrats are all that extreme when it comes to gun control. It is just a matter of sensible measures — and even they are beyond the pale.

I kind of think that Stern’s article was an indirect attack from the Clinton campaign. But now we have an attack ad from Generation Forward, the Super-PAC of Martin O’Malley. And it’s pretty effective in its way. Just the same, when I saw it, I though, “So?!” For one thing, I know that Sanders isn’t a liberal. In most nations, socialists are the nationalists. One of the great things about Sanders is that he is no shrinking violet. Conservatives might blast him on his economics (which are hugely popular), but they can’t pretend that he isn’t strong — they can’t paint him as effete.

There’s more than a hint of desperation here. This line is telling, “The NRA even paid for ads attacking a Sanders opponent.” That’s a reference to Sanders 1990 campaign against Peter Smith for the Vermont’s at-large Representative seat. Apparently, Smith had angered the NRA by voting for the assault weapons ban. So it was 25 years ago, and it certainly wasn’t an endorsement of Sanders.

The text that goes along with Generation Forward’s YouTube post of the video claims, “You can’t claim to soak the fat boys and exempt the profiteers in the gun industry.” That’s a good one! For one thing, it’s a total distortion of Sanders’ economic policies. For another, there is a big difference between different gun control policies and proper economic policy. No one thinks that Sanders has voted the way that he votes to curry favor with the small weapons industry and its media arm, the NRA.

Politics is serious business. I don’t blame O’Malley for doing whatever it takes to get a little traction. I just doubt it will work. It seems a little early to start this kind of thing anyway. There are still the debates, which will doubtless help him. But for right now, I can see his campaign getting a desperate. Sanders is getting a lot of good attention. But so did Howard Dean in 2004. We should all relax.

Oh, also: Bernie Sanders 2016!

Bobby Jindal announced his run for the presidency yesterday with a video — probably because it’s too expensive to pay actors to fill a room. There is no doubt that he’s a long-shot. For the past six months, he’s had a string of embarrassments. Most notably, he went to the UK to talk about the supposed “no-go zones” in London. He was widely mocked in the British press. Lucky for Jindal, the American press is much nicer about this kind of thing. To me, the biggest thing about Jindal is his social conservative bent. He is normally a Catholic, but he sounds like an evangelical. He follows the church’s teaching when it comes to homosexuality and abortion and pretty much nothing else. (Note: the Catholic church is not easy for liberals or conservatives.)

But Jonathan Bernstein has a positive take on the candidacy, Bobby Jindal’s 2016 Bid Makes Sense. He noted that the race is actually wide open. Jindal may be polling at number 15 (which puts him below some people who haven’t officially announced), but a lot could change, “Jindal — like Chris Christie, who is apparently moving ahead with his own effort — has correctly assessed that the Republican front-runners are weak enough that a long shot could win the nomination.” So why not?

Think back to the 2012 Republican nomination fight. It seemed that every week there was a new front runner. But 2016 was supposed to be different because there were going to be some top tier candidates. I don’t even know what that means anymore. The Republicans have a problem in that they really don’t disagree about anything. Every once in a while, someone will come out in favor of immigration reform, only to be shouted down. So who is in the lead is more or less random — based upon the most recent news. (Check this out: Donald Trump currently polls in second place in New Hampshire.)

Remember that Newt Gingrich got 137 electoral votes in the primary. If he had been a reasonable candidate, he could have caught fire and gone the whole way. And he wasn’t even trying hard. Consider, more tellingly, Herman Cain. Had he been a real candidate, he probably would have won. The truth is that the Republican base is desperate to vote for an African American who will tell them that race is not an issue and that they are the true victims. And I think Jindal fits that bill very well. The Republicans, after all, are proud of having the two whitest Latinos in the world — Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The fact that Jindal in Indian, doesn’t matter.

It is a crap shoot. But sure: Jindal has a shot. I certainly think he has a better shot than Chris Christie does. But the fact that he has a shot is more a reflection of the Republican Party than it is of him. The truth is that the party has little to offer. So they are all going to stand on the debate state and pander to the base. We will see which one of them can be more against immigration or more for destroying the Islamic State and just generally be more “real America.” Jindal could catch a break. So could almost any of them. Just like in 2012.

It usually doesn’t mean much to tell people not to be afraid of airplane travel because it is so much safer than automobile travel. Similarly, it doesn’t mean much to tell people not to worry about terrorist acts because they are far more likely to be crushed by their refrigerator. So on that level, I don’t think it much matters that New America released a report that found that right wing terrorists were responsible for just under twice as many American deaths as jihadists were.

Of course, most Americans are not worried about terrorism. It is something far removed from their lives. It is just something that they worry about now and then because the media get them worked up about it. And for those poor people who have Fox News on all day, we must have great sympathy. They are fed a constant diet of hate and fear to the point where they actually think that the Islamic State poses a threat to them in the suburbs of Kansas City.

But I think the New America report ought to be very important from a policy standpoint: that we aren’t using our resources effectively. After Dylann Roof committed his heinous murders and we found out about his online “manifesto” and his well known attitudes and threats, I wondered where the FBI had been. It seems that a couple of times per year, we hear about some big terrorist plot that was stopped by the FBI. And in each case, it is the same: the FBI found a mentally unstable person, whipped him up into a jihadist frenzy, and then arrested him for it. It’s like clockwork.

And the coverage is always the same. The mainstream media report on the big “terror plot.” There are congratulations all around. And then, we read in The Guardian or The Intercept that it was just another FBI plot foiled by the FBI. We seem to spend a whole lot of time and energy on this kind of thing. And just imagine how many people the FBI tries to set up who won’t go along with the deal. Regardless, these resources could be used to scan all the new domain name purchases. One called The Last Rhodesian should stand out. Or it would if the FBI were interested in real threats to Americans rather than creating finely scripted “terror plots” for the mainstream media to eat up and the government to keep funding.

But look at the chart above. It’s from an article by Glenn Greenwald and Josh Begley, The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fear-Mongering and Bigotry: Reality. It is a nice reminder. It brings back memories of Fahrenheit 9/11, where people in a Virginia suburb can only come up with Walmart as a possible terrorist target. But the truth is that the people in the FBI and all the other parts of the “homeland security” apparatus know all this stuff. But apparently, there is little money in reducing real threats like cars and environmental hazards.

So we will continue on getting a constant focus on the jihadists, even as they seem more occupied far away killing peaceful Muslims. And we will only occasionally be reminded of right wing extremists when people like Roof pop up to kill people. There will be no more resources put on it. We won’t be allowed to talk about easy access to guns. Even racism will be largely off limits. But if we are very, very lucky, the South Carolina capital grounds will stop flying the Confederate flag. I guess that’s something. But there is still the state flag of Mississippi. And, you know, everything else.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court found against the plaintiffs in King v Burwell — thus keeping the subsidies for Obamacare bought on the federal exchanges. I’m pleased, of course. The last thing we needed was the kind of disruption that finding for the plaintiff would have created. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion and he made pretty much the same argument he did the first time Obamacare made its way to the Court, “The court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery.” In other words, the court is not there to be pedantic.

For those who don’t know, the question before the court regarded five words: “an exchange established by the state.” Obamacare provided subsidies for people buying insurance on these exchanges. The plaintiffs claimed that if a state used an exchange run by the federal government, then subsidies were not available. It turned out that this phrase was contradicted by other phrases in the law. So whichever way the court found would conflict with parts of the law. So the three judges that found against it — Scalia, Alito, and Thomas — were not being consistent. As usual, they were just being ideologues.

The result still bothers me. Scalia’s dissent is apparently sarcastic, talking about the clear meaning of the five words. It’s just the same as his broccoli comments last time. What it makes me think is that all you need to know how this unholy trinity will find in a case is to listen to what people are saying on right wing radio. But as we know from Ian Millhiser, this has generally been the rule. The Supreme Court is not a serious deliberative body. In general, it is a deeply conservative body that finally sees reason long after everyone else has.

The problem is that smart people can always find plausible sounding reasons for their opinions — regardless of how absurd those opinions are. Scalia claimed that “words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the state.'” Matt Yglesias noted that words don’t actually work the way that Scalia claims. Yglesias provided the following amusing paragraph to demonstrate:

The good news about the ruling can be found from Brian Beutler, Game Over, Obamacare Haters. He noted that Roberts wrote the decision to close down this process of chipping away at Obamacare — looking for a few loose words in the massive law and try to use it to tear the whole thing apart. “The ruling thus combines a standard textualist mode of interpretation — a view to the statute’s full context to determine the meaning of isolated provisions — with a common sense analysis of the law’s structure into a mode of interpretation you might call heurism.” That’s a good thing.

Last July, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, found against the plaintiffs in his case, stating that the phrase was “ambiguous and subject to multiple interpretations.” And that meant that the IRS had a right to deference regarding its interpretation. Given that the IRS has been given great latitude in interpreting lots of statutes, this seems like the reasonable interpretation. It should have stopped there. A 6-3 decision is fine — I’ll take it. But the fact that Scalia and company will allow this is an embarrassment.

David Wasserman, like a good liberal, is very careful when talking about the Democrats’ chances in the 2016 election, Mapping the 2016 Electorate: Demographics Don’t Guarantee a Democratic White House. But the article is about how much more the electorate favors the Democrats in 2016 than it did in 2012. Jonathan Chait provided a better headline, How Much Will Demographics Help Hillary Clinton? He pointed out what ought to be obvious to all, “And, of course, nobody thinks demographics guarantee a Democratic White House.” But it does highlight the problem that the Republicans have. It’s like going into the last inning of a baseball game: being up one run up doesn’t mean you will win, but it’s better than being one run down.

Wasserman calculated that, all else being even, the changing demographics will give the Democrats a 1.5 percentage point boost. He provided the numbers for the 15 states where Romney and Obama were within 10 percentage points of each other. And it is striking. Florida, which Obama won by just 0.9 percentage points, has a demographic change of 1.6 percentage point shift, indicating a much more comfortable 2.5 percent point victory. North Carolina is even a more exciting shift. Obama lost by 2.0 percent points, but with the help of a 1.7 percentage point shift in that state, 2016 would see a Democratic defeat of just 0.3 percentage points — really down in the noise.

I still maintain that the political science fundamentals dictate that the trend of the economy is the single biggest issue. If the economy goes into recession at the beginning of next year, the Republicans are almost certain to win. As a result of this, I worry about the actions of the Federal Reserve. They keep putting off raising interest rates. While I believe that is the right thing to do, there is enormous pressure by the power elite for the Fed to raise rates. It just can’t be justified right now: the inflation rate this year have been zero, nada, nichts, nothing!

But will the Fed raise them next year, tanking the economy just in time to assure a Republican victory? This shouldn’t happen. If the Fed does its job properly, it should be able to cool the economy without throwing it into recession. But you have to wonder about the Fed raising rates in 2016 — which I am almost certain it will do. For four years, the inflation rate has been below the Fed’s 2% target — a target that I consider too low anyway. If the target is 2%, shouldn’t the Fed allow the rate to get a bit above that level for a while? We will see just how professional and courageous the Fed shows itself to be over the next year.

There is another side to this, however. I wonder if there isn’t a tipping point. The Republicans have put all their political eggs in one one basket. And as the country has changed demographically, the party has done nothing to reach out to the demographic groups that are growing. Are we reaching the point where a modest recession would still allow the Democrats to win the presidency? I don’t think we are there yet. But one thing is for certain: if the economy continues to improve, Hillary Clinton will beat any Republican who runs against her. And she will do it by a larger margin than Obama beat Romney.