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!”

What’s we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. I hate it when someone tells me they are a political independent. The truth is, I don’t even really know what that means. Does it mean that you think Keynesian economic policy is good in 2008 and then decide that supply side economics is actually right in 2012, only to change back again in 2016? Do you think that women should have reproductive rights one year and then don’t the next? No, it doesn’t mean these things. People’s ideological convictions stay pretty consistent because they are rarely countered on them. So what does it mean to be politically independent?

It generally means one of two things. It could mean that you don’t pay much attention to politics, don’t care much about politics, and just vote for whichever candidate seems nicest. In the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, Irene Reilly is such a voter; she doesn’t vote for presidents — she votes for their wives. (Admittedly, that isn’t the worst idea in the world.) The second thing it could mean to be politically independent is to be pretentious. Most independents I speak to are of this variety: they want people to think of them as open minded and beyond labels.

A new Gallup Poll is out that shows that the number of people claiming to be “independent” is at an all time high: 43%. It has been rising steadily since 2008. Basically, during that time, three percentage points of people once claiming to be Democrats and two percentage points of their Republican counterparts now call themselves independents. (This does not include the Republican drop of 5 percentage points from 2004 to 2008.)

At The Washington Post, Aaron Blake wrote, A Record Number of Americans Claim to Be Independent. They Are Kidding Themselves. He called this for what it is, “What we have here isn’t so much a rise in political independence as much as a rise in the desire to be labeled ‘independent.'” And he runs down the evidence that there is actually less political independence than there has been in a very long time. It’s worth checking out because it isn’t the usual direct evidence that “independents” still vote as consistently as self-described Republicans and Democrats. Blake shows that the “swing” voters have declined as a percentage of presidential voters since at least the early 1990s.

I noted a year and a half ago what is really going on, Is Michelle Bernard Really an Independent? In that article, I wrote:

And that pretty much sums it up. It is largely in reaction to this kind of thinking that makes me a Democrat. I am much more unhappy with the Democratic Party than most liberal “independents.” Similarly, I’ve known a number of people who called themselves independents because they thought that the Republican Party was too liberal. I’ll bet most of that two percentage point decrease in Republicans are people who are unhappy that the Republicans haven’t shut down the government enough.

Ultimately, Blake’s conclusion is what sums up the rise of the independents, “About the only thing that’s increasing is the self-delusion of independence.” What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate. That’s always the case when people delude themselves. You can’t have an honest conversation with people who aren’t honest with themselves.

A couple of days ago, Charlie Pierce brought my attention to quite an amazing bit of rhetoric from the estimable Steve King. King was on WorldNetDaily’s Radio America where he claimed that the founding fathers would be “aghast” at Obama. Certainly he’s right. Most of them would never have found an African American president acceptable. But King does not mean that, because of course, conservatives don’t like to face up to the fact that our nation was founded by a bunch of bigots (some worse than others). No, King is talking about the fact that Obama’s “word means nothing.”

You see, the founding fathers were men of honor. And his example? “It’s been 210 years since Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought a duel over honor.” Ah, yes: that honorable duel. And what was it over? Burr felt insulted by something that Hamilton had said. This was coming off Burr’s devastating loss to the almost unknown Morgan Lewis to become governor of New York in 1804. Burr thought Hamilton had helped Lewis, and he probably did. Regardless, the whole thing seems more like a squabble between mean girls in a suburban high school. Ah yes, honor!

In addition, there is some contention that Hamilton monkeyed with the trigger mechanism of his pistol to make it fire with less pressure than normal. If he did so, it was the wrong thing to do. Or maybe he did it because he knew that Burr was a far better shot. I don’t know. Nor do I especially care. The two showed all the maturity of, I don’t know, Steve King.

Burr was, shortly after, tried for treason. I don’t think there is anything to that except that Jefferson had a hate-on for him. And as my opinion of Jefferson has greatly declined in recent years, I can’t hold that against Burr. However, after the duel, Burr did run off to Louisiana. And while there he most certainly looked into starting a war between Spain and Mexico — hoping to start his whole little kingdom in the newly independent Mexico.

Now some might consider this this a great thing — like the American Revolutionary War. But I think it rather casts a dimmer light on the founding of our own country. When you look at what many of the proponents wanted out of the separation with England, it was not noble. In fact, a big cause for the separation was the fear of southern slave owners that England was going to outlaw slavery. That wasn’t true of Burr, of course, who was very much against slavery. But his petulant behavior doesn’t speak well of him or any of the founding fathers — except for Thomas Paine who people like Steve King would hate if they had ever read his work or any works about him.

I don’t think anyone can reasonably say that Obama is dishonorable. And the nation as a whole is a lot more honorable now than it was 200 years ago. Having fatal duels over petty insults is a sign of immaturity not nobility. It’s interesting that legislative violence has only really come back in the last few years since the Republicans have become so radicalized and been consigned to the minority.

If anything, a prime act of dishonor is what Steve King does: use the fact that he is a big fish in a little (but for historical reasons, politically important) pond to force policy on the right in extremely damaging directions — both for his party and for the nation. That’s something that Steve King ought to give a little thought to — right after he reads a dozen books about American history.

See also: Jim Mowrer on Steve King.

It might surprise you to know that I have great sympathy for Bob McDonnell who was just sentenced to two years in prison. Some people are scoffing at the sentence, but I’d like to see them do two years in federal prison. But more than that, I’ve always seen his crime as indicative of our broken political system. Generally, only rich people become governors of large states. So McDonnell and his wife found themselves in this sea of rich people and they felt like they were out of their depth. Bob McDonnell was governor, after all. And I’m sympathetic to that. What he did was wrong and he shouldn’t have done it. But I’m far more concerned about the fact everyone swimming around our governors are rich. That is the problem we should all be concerned about.

Barring people like the gunmen who murdered the people at Charlie Hebdo, I generally feel sorry for people who go away to prison. People who think of it as “easy” or a “vacation” are completely ignorant of the situation. But that doesn’t mean that I will brook the kind of nonsense that Ruth Marcus dished out last night, For Bob McDonnell, Justice Was Served. It’s not that I necessarily agree or disagree with her conclusion. The problem is her logic.

She noted that Bob McDonnell’s “promising career” is now over. Is that not enough of a punishment?! She went back on this later, claiming that, well, if you follow this logic to its natural conclusion that “prison is never justified in cases of public corruption.” And that can’t be the case. But the truth is that McDonnell’s promising career is not over. He may yet have a career in politics. If not, I’m sure he has enough connections to get a good lobbying job. And at the absolute worst, someone will get him a job in upper management at some corporation. He’ll be fine.

What most definitely will not happen to McDonnell is that he will be working as a busboy at Denny’s or forced into a life of crime because no one will hire him. This, of course, is the fate of most people who do two years in federal prison. In fact, this is what happens to most people who get convicted of felonies and don’t have to serve any time at all. The prison time is, in the long-term, the least of the punishment meted out to convicted felons. Bob McDonnell is far luckier than the Ruth Marcuses of the world could ever know.

Marcus wrote something else that almost gave me a stroke:

Let’s leave aside the preposterous idea that “pillars of the community” cannot also be violent criminals. Apparently, she’s never heard of John Wayne Gacy. And let’s leave aside the implicit plea for leniency for the “right kind of people.” What does Ruth Marcus think are the crimes of people in federal prison? As of 29 November 2014, almost 75% of the people in federal prison were there for clearly non-violent crimes. Almost half (48.7%) where there for drug offenses.

But it all goes together. The people in jail for drug crimes are primarily poor. They are by definition not the “right kind of people.” So it doesn’t matter that they are going to be sentenced to at least three years and often far longer. On the state level, it can be much worse. In Kentucky, “For simple possession, first offenders in Kentucky get two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.”

I’m allowed to say, “For Bob McDonnell, justice was served.” But Ruth Marcus is not. I’ve spent the last two decades of my life pushing for an end to drug criminalization. Ruth Marcus occasionally mentions that mandatory minimum sentences are a bad thing — when it occurs to her. But I can’t find her arguing that the “chief rationale for incarceration — incapacitating the dangerous offender to protect society — does not apply” when it comes to drug “criminals.” Because I’m sure she doesn’t believe that. Growing up in the upper class and studying at Yale didn’t exactly prepare her to empathize with “those kind of people.” She shows a little pity occasionally, but never empathy.