Now that George Zimmerman has been acquitted of culpability in the death of Trayvon Martin, I think I should provide my thoughts. Most notable, of course, is all the rioting that went on last night. I tell you: that black community! What a bunch of uppity people! Oh, that’s right. There were no riots. That was just in the minds of bigots like Bill O’Reilly. Here’s a typical bigot tweet from Robert Stacy McCain, “If #Zimmerman is acquitted, black people will riot. If #Zimmerman is convicted, white people will grab a beer, change the channel to ESPN.” Those people riot but we just chill. And notice that it is black people who want Zimmerman convicted and white people who want him acquitted. It is all about race. (What I find interesting is that McCain is a “mainstream” conservative, yet he isn’t embarrassed; he hasn’t deleted his tweet.)

The verdict does not come as a big surprise. I figure the incident went down more or less like the defense said. Zimmerman was following Martin. Eventually, Martin noticed. At that point, Zimmerman might have even turned around. Martin might have approached Zimmerman. Or not. Regardless, I suspect that Martin said something like, “Why are you following me?” This quickly escalated from words to pushing to an all out fight. Martin was beating Zimmerman in the fight. So Zimmerman pulled his gun and killed Martin.

Even before the trial, it was clear that the problem was not especially Zimmerman but the evil law that allowed him to walk around with a gun and kill anyone any time he felt “threatened.” I wrote about how bizarre it all is:

There is some talk that there will be a federal civil rights trial. That seems unlikely. But a civil trial probably will happen. I do hope not. I am totally against these double jeopardy loophole trials. Again, the issue is the law, not that Zimmerman managed to use the law to his advantage.

As far as the verdict goes, I feel much the same as I did after the O. J. Simpson trial: Zimmerman is clearly guilty but I don’t think the jury was wrong to acquit. The question is where we go from here. Will this cause Florida and other states to reconsider their “stand your ground” laws? I am extremely cynical when it comes to gun laws. I suspect that this case will not create the slightest push for reform. It is much more likely that people will continue to use these laws to knowingly get away with murder. I very much hope that I’m wrong.

Afterword

Despite the fact that Zimmerman seems to have no gift for public speaking, I’m sure we will quickly see him on the lecture circuit. He will be in high demand at pro-gun as well as general conservative events. The trial tarnished his image to some extent. In order to get him off, his defense team had to paint him as a bumbling fool. But I don’t think that’s a big deal. Most people will remember him as the courageous white man who stood up to the scary black man. I’m sure Zimmerman could get $5,000 per show. It will annoy me greatly to see that. But mark my words.

KTVU, who have done some excellent reporting of last week’s SFO plane crash, got pranked yesterday. They thought that the names of the pilots had been released to them:

For those of you who missed it, they are:

• Captain Something Wrong
• We Too Low
• Holy Fuck
• Bang, Ding, Ow

What’s most interesting is how the staff at KTVU fell for the prank. The truth is that for Americans, Asian names are a problem. They tend to sound unintentionally funny—often sexual. So I’m sure that the people at the TV station were trying to be respectful. In fact, just listen to how carefully the anchor is pronouncing the names. So the prank only works because the reporters are trying so hard to be respectful about something they know little about. And that’s a good thing; I wish they acted that way about all the other things they don’t understand very well.

I don’t want to go too easy on KTVU, however. San Francisco has a very big Asian population. If that community was better represented in the newsroom, this mightn’t have happened. Regardless, it looks as though KTVU had no one but the pranksters themselves to count on for the pronunciations. That is at least a bit sad.

On the other side—the pranksters—the intent is not so noble. It is very funny, of course. But I can’t help but notice just how ethnocentric if not outright racist the joke is. For example, the names are really more Chinese than Korean. I don’t think “Wong” is a Korean surname, but it is Chinese. The same is true of “Lo.” Much more than this, however, there is a clear aspect of cultural superiority indicted with the pigeon English and the plaintive cry, “We too low!”

Don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is that most of the humor here is based upon our shocking lack of knowledge about other cultures. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t laugh at it, because I certainly have. In particular, I thought the most offensive “Wi Tu Lo” was very funny. And “Captain Sun Ting Wong” is a brilliant bit of comic detail that KTVU dutifully reported. But after all that, I think it is a good idea to step back and look at why we find all of this so funny. Why are we so focused on our own culture that at first we don’t even notice the fake names and then we find them funny as hell. That completely describes me. And I wish it didn’t.

H/T: William Brown

Update (13 July 2013 3:12 pm)

Will tells me that it actually came from an unpaid intern at NTSB. As you all probably know, I’m not too keen on the whole unpaid intern thing. It is just another way to give the rich an even bigger economic advantage over the poor. He also noted that the San Francisco NBC affiliate, KRON, has a much more diverse staff than KTVU.

Update (13 July 2013 5:56 pm)

Twitter user B. Justice alerted me to misinformation in the last update. The intern did not provide the original information; he only confirmed it. KTVU has not explained where they got the original information.

Americans United for Change made the following ad highlighting GOP obstruction in the Senate. It is well done. But it doesn’t go into the kind of depth that I would like. What is so annoying about what has happened in the Senate is that for the first time—Let me say that again: for the first time!—the media report filibusters as though they were normal votes. It is common to hear things like, “The bill was voted down on a party line vote of 55-45”! Really?! It was voted down as though everyone knows that normal Senate procedure is that you have to get 60 votes for everything. This is, by the way, one of the many subtle ways that “objective” media distort the news. The way that norms are maintained is by people noting extreme behavior when it happens. If everyone treats the disregard for norms as de rigueur, those norms are not long for this world.

But what you really need to know about Senate obstruction is that whenever the Democrats are in the minority, the number of filibusters stays constant or goes down. Whenever Republicans are in the minority, the number of filibusters goes up—way up. See for yourself:

So despite what Megan McArdle may think is “arguably” the truth, this is a Republican Party problem. And unless everyone stands up and admits this, there is no downside for bad behavior. And it will continue.

A lot of people wonder what a liberal like Dean Baker means when he writes a book like, The End of Loser Liberalism. He means a lot, of course, and you should read it because that link provides the book in various electronic formats that are free. But mostly what he means is that the whole paradigm that we have of liberals being for big government and conservatives being for small government is just dead wrong. I write about this a lot myself, but I’m not sure that I didn’t originally get the idea from him. The fact is that conservatives are just for a different kind of big government. Most of the time, it is even bigger than the government liberals want. What’s more, it is infinitely more pernicious. My favorite example is that liberals want to spend money on libraries. No one ever lost their liberty because of public libraries. Yes, I know: conservatives think that taxation is theft, but that doesn’t stop them from taxing for whatever it is they want. And the things they want to tax for really are associated with the loss of liberty: armies, spying, vaginal probes.

Today, we had as clear an example of this divide as we will ever have. The farm bill is normally a very popular thing. Rural representatives like it because it gives money and price supports to farmers; urban representatives like it because it gives food (mostly in the form of food stamps or SNAP) to poor people. But when the House tried to pass a farm bill last month, it failed. Democrats didn’t like it because it made savage cuts to SNAP. The most conservative Republicans didn’t like it because it didn’t cut SNAP enough. So in order to get a farm bill passed, the House Republicans split the farm bill in half: part for farms and part for SNAP. And they passed the “farm only” bill and said they would get to the “SNAP only” bill later.

Note what’s going on. The Republicans have no trouble with spending taxpayer money. They just don’t want it to go to the poor. It is just fine if it goes to farmers. This is interesting, because as economist Vincent H. Smith has shown, farmers are richer than Americans on average, and getting more so. And in the past, this is what people hated about the farm bill. It wasn’t that poor families were getting nutritional support or that kids were getting hot lunches at school. Now the Republican Party is saying very clearly that all that really matters is that tax dollars go to people they see as authentic rather than those who might actually need it.

There is another part of it. The farm bill sets price floors on goods. That is a big way that it helps farmers. This means that everyone has to pay more for food than they would in a free market. Those hit worst by these price floors are the poor. Thus, SNAP is a logical way to offset that unfair burden (although it does far more than that). As you can see from this, it has nothing to do with conservatives being in favor of free markets. Not only are conservatives giving direct payments middle class and much more wealthy farmers, they are providing a huge distortion to the market with price supports.

The real question is why even liberals continue to believe that they are for big government and conservatives are not. I think this stems largely from conservative mythology. They so believe that liberalism is a form of socialism and conservatism is a form of libertarianism, that they have themselves convinced that they really are for small government. History tells a different story with the two coming out of exactly the same traditions. And thus, it isn’t surprising that they act much the same. And there is also the question of how politics works. People get political power by providing their constituencies things they want. There is no consistency that wants the government to disappear. But there are constituencies that believe the only correct function for government is to give stuff to them alone. And that’s how we get today’s logic: farmer gooood! Poor people baaad!

There was much rejoicing yesterday as a bipartisan group of Senators allowed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to move through the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Committee. That’s good, of course, but does it really matter. There is so much about all of this stuff that strikes me more as theater than anything else. The problem is that commentators treat it as though it were real. In this case, does anyone think this has a chance to pass through the Republican controlled House?

But I’m more interested in the word “bipartisan.” I know that technically, if 54 Democrats and 1 Republican vote for a bill, it is bipartisan. But doesn’t that give a bill a sheen of widespread acceptance that it really doesn’t deserve. The best example of this kind of thing is the immigration bill. I don’t anyone for a moment that anyone thought that calling it bipartisan was wrong. After all, it received 68 votes in the Senate. But that was just because all the Democrats and only 30% of the Republicans voted for it. And that was about as bipartisan a vote as we’ve seen in the last four years (other than the important legislative efforts to rename post offices).

So it was with the effort to bring ENDA out of committee. The vote was 15 to 7. That doesn’t sound that bad, of course. The problem is that the vote was heavily weighted toward the Democrats, all 12 of whom voted it out of committee. With the Republicans, it was 3 to 7. Again with the 30%! I’m beginning to think that any bill that would traditionally have received near unanimous support can get at most three out of ten Republicans. That means in the always more reasonable Senate, 30% of the Republicans are awful and evil but not completely useless. That leaves 70% who are awful and evil and useless.

When Obama first got into office he was very excited about the prospects of bipartisanship. Remember when he thought he could get 80 votes in the Senate for the ACA? (That would have been 50% of the Republicans.) Over time, he’s learned that such thinking was naive bullshit. But the press still wants to believe it. And they want to believe it in all kinds of ways. That’s why clear charlatans like Paul Ryan are held up as models: the Reasonable Republican! And just the same, the talk of bipartisanship is just another way of saying, “See: the Republican Party isn’t that bad.”

We’ve moved from a place where actual moderate Republicans would vote for reasonable bills to a place where pretend moderate Republicans will only vote on bills that are so conservative that most Democrats would have voted against them thirty years ago. And these bipartisan votes are heralded by those ostensibly on the left to argue that democracy continues to work. (This is like sitting in a car without an engine and saying, “See: it works; I can sit in it!”) What it usually means is simply that the Democrats have compromised so much that the slightly less nutty Republicans will support it. And then it’s off to the House to die!

I keep waiting to hear something about Debra Milke, the women who was wrongly convicted of having her son murdered 23 years ago. But I guess Maricopa County hasn’t decided if they are going to retry her yet. Regardless, The Daily Beast published an article a bit more than a month ago that showed a lot of what is wrong with the media’s coverage of our justice system, Death Row Debbie Milke Could Soon Be Free. The problem is not just the original reporting but this article itself.

Much of the article focuses on Phoenix journalist Paul Rubin. He reported on the trial at the time. And I find his whole approach to the case deeply troubling. He seems to see it more like theater than a criminal trial. For example, he said, “She was one of the worst witnesses I’ve ever seen.” He added that when the prosecutor handed Milke her son’s shoes for identification, “She just nodded.” Oh my God! That is telling.

The Daily Beast writer, Terry Greene Sterling, added to this impression by noting that the misogynistic lying copy, Armando Saldate “had been a police officer for 21 years, and had testified frequently in court.” So you see: it isn’t that an injustice was done; this is just the kind of thing that happens to bad performers. If only Milke had learned her trade by testifying at trials for lesser crimes, maybe she could have competed with such a polished pro as Saldate.

The original journalist continues to wrong Milke (and Sterling willingly obliges). He noted that 22 years ago, Milke seemed “kinda flirty” during interviews. I don’t even know what that means, but Rubin clearly thought it meant she was guilty. Now, I don’t know what Rubin’s or any other reporter’s stories looked like. But I’m sure they were a lot heavier on innuendo about Milke and a lot lighter on Armondo Saldate’s background. And that was kind of important given that the entire reason that Milke is currently on death row is his testimony that Milke confessed to him.

I don’t doubt that both reporters consider themselves as objective. But this is a what passes as objective reporting from Sterling:

I have two problems with this. First, that first sentence is almost panicked, “No one said Milke’s innocent!” That seems highly defensive as though the Arizona journalists are a little tender about that point. Could it be that their “objective” coverage at the time was anything but? Second, I don’t find the lack of motive from Styers and Scott hard to understand at all. The prosecution never looked for a motive because they had already decided that they knew. This statement by the court shouldn’t just be left hanging there with no context. Regardless, I don’t see any reason why the guys didn’t roll over on her, but I can well imagine there might have been some.

When you read me, you know where I’m coming from. I know that cops perjurer themselves all the time. I know that they fabricate evidence. I know that they make snap judgments about cases and then disregard contradictory evidence. That doesn’t make me an idiot, but I have a perspective. The problem is that Rubin and Sterling have a perspective too. They just want you to think that they don’t. (In fairness, they probably think they don’t too.)

In Rubin’s case, this is more forgivable. But Sterling wrote an article that spent much time discussing whether Milke was guilty when that is not what this story is now about. The question is whether she should have been convicted in the first place. The evidence is overwhelming that she should not have been. And maybe if the justice system weren’t so screwed up that the prosecution went to trial with a single piece of evidence, they might have searched for more and found it. But they didn’t. The question is quite simply, “Was justice done?” And no amount of commentary about court decorum and “flirty” behavior will change that. Justice was not done and that woman should be set free.

Afterword

The article ends with a quote from Rubin regarding seeing Milke at a recent hearing, “She was a hunched-over white haired woman. I was shocked.” Yeah. That’s what 22 years on death row can do to a person. It isn’t about the fact that she was a bad witness, asshole! At least it isn’t supposed to be.

Earlier today, I was looking for statistics on the number of gun suicides in the United States. This is an issue that I’ve written about a lot. So I looked there for a link. And I found one! It was to the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence (ICAHV) website. But don’t click on that link, because it will just take you to a “Page Not Found” error page. It would be one thing if the ICAHV didn’t exist anymore, but that’s not the case. What it looks like happened is that they just decided to rearrange their site. The page used to be at /facts-about-suicide-and-gun-violence but now it is at /gun-facts/suicide-and-gun-violence.

I find myself in this situation quite often. And with over 2,300 article on this blog, I cannot spend my time going through all the links to see if they are still good. In the case of ICAHV, the situation is completely unacceptable. A site can reorganize itself and still protect old links. And this should be a priority for an advocacy group. But the problem is much worse than this. Entire sites go away. This may seem like a problem that cannot be solved but that isn’t true. I have plans that when this site has outlived its usefulness to me (like when I die), it will still exist except with ads that will pay for the hosting fees. That might not be possible with content that requires royalties be paid, but I’m sure even that issue could be worked out. (Normally when a publisher goes out of business, the copyright returns to the writer; most writers would prefer that their work still exist.)

By far the biggest problem I run into is with embedded videos. Sometimes videos are taken down because there was a copyright claim. I understand that and little can be done except to fix our broken intellectual property system. But mostly, videos go away simply because YouTube accounts are closed. Most of these are not of the type that YouTube closed for “multiple copyright violations.” It seems that people just remove their YouTube accounts for what reason I can’t say. Regardless, it’s a pain.

Another problem that is only getting bigger is the change from free content to paid content. I have years of links to the New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which are now behind a pay wall. There is an obvious solution for this if it weren’t that these companies were evil. They could keep previously free content free. For example, the Post only went pay last month. Why not keep all of the content before June free? After all, people are only paying for the new content. They are, after all, news papers. It would actually make sense to keep all content that is more than a month old free. That would have many advantages, including keeping the brand alive. But they won’t do that because, as I said, they are evil.

Felix Salmon took on this issue last week, The Spread of Link Rot. His concern is more from the standpoint of a reader than a writer. And it is more of a lament: nothing can be done! There is a lot that can be done. For one thing, if I were Salmon, I would try to get some protections in my contract. If enough writers of his stature took on the issue, something might happen. And there are potential technological solutions to the problem. They could also do what people like Jonathan Bernstein do and have their own blogs, which they can control.

The reason the situation seems hopeless to people like Salmon is that they’ve been trained to think like their corporate overlords. If any given page isn’t getting tens of thousands of views per day, it is useless. This is very much like Hollywood blockbusters. They play for a few weeks and then they are on your TV. But those of us working the margins of the internet are like people who make tiny films: we expect to grow an audience over a long period of time. Thus, if a year old Felix Salmon column has a broken link, it doesn’t much matter. He may not like it, but he knows that the vast majority of people read what he writes as he writes it. But it really does matter to me that my links are good a year or two on, because I still get a fair percentage of my traffic from those old articles.

So I try as best I can to fix broken links, replace paid content with free content, and find replacement videos. But my time is limited.

I was reading a post by Paul Krugman this morning, and I thought I was reading my own writing. He sounded downright despondent. The article is, On the Political Economy of Permanent Stagnation, and it speculates about how things may not get better. It was the first time I realized that in general, Krugman is a pretty upbeat commentator. And I suspect he will be again. His father died last week and that has got to put a grey patina on one’s world view.

But just because he’s looking at the world from an unhappy place right now doesn’t mean he’s wrong. It is extremely hard not to be discouraged. As he points out, except in Japan, the best we’ve seen from policy makers in the developed world is an attempt to limit damage. No one seems willing or able to do what every introductory economics textbook of the last 50 years says should be done. The situation may actually be better in Greece and Italy and Portugal because things are so bad there. Here is the United States, we are very likely to get absolutely no policy response even if this goes on for a couple of decades. Things are bad but they aren’t that bad.

Or as Krugman puts it:

My evolution on this subject has taken a very dark turn this last year. I used to think that the power elites could abuse the nation for only so long. Eventually, the people would rise up. But there are so many things in the United States that push against democracy. Start with a Senate that is not only undemocratic, it skews highly conservative because people from rural states simply don’t understand (or care) about the needs of the majority of their countrymen who live in urban areas. Add to this gerrymandering that is currently killing our country by allowing both state and federal government to be controlled by conservatives entirely against the will of the people. Add the undemocratic effects of unlimited money in politics. And top it all off with a huge dollop of voter suppression and you have the makings for a government run by a small, radical minority.

I’m sure as time goes on, Paul Krugman will feel better about the state of our nation. But it will take something more than a better mood to change my outlook.

Benjy Sarlin has a great article about the New Southern Strategy that I’ve been writing about, How the GOP Stopped Worrying About Latinos and Learned to Love the Base. It lays out the best statistical counter argument to Sean Trende that I’ve read. As you know, I don’t think any of this really matters. The Republican Party has no intention of changing. For one thing, they have a long history of getting people to vote against their best interests by voting Republican. That’s what the “Reagan Democrats” were: people who resented blacks more than they cared about their own well being. So it only makes sense that they would continue to think that they can win elections while remaining unpopular. And the recent damage to the Voting Rights Act only makes that opinion all the more compelling to the Republican Party.

And that got me thinking: voter suppression. There is a very old theory about liberals and conservatives. It claims that liberals make policies based upon the way they want people to be, but conservatives base their policies on the way people actual are. I think there actually used to be something to this. A lot of socialist thought assumed that incentives didn’t matter whereas conservatives were all about incentives. For the last few decades, though, liberals have been all about incentives. In as much as conservatives think about incentives, they now believe they are the only thing that matters, which is just as big a mistake as thinking that they don’t matter at all.

But in a more fundamental way, the Republican Party believes things that are clearly untrue. We saw this most clearly last year where even Mitt Romney went into election day thinking he was going to win despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But more to the point, I have noticed that a lot of conservatives really do think that any time a Republican loses an election it is a sign of voter fraud. I believe this comes from the extremely insular nature of conservative politics. Just look at the Deer Lady: it is clear she never hears anything about politics that is not filtered through a right wing extremist.

It goes much deeper than this. Much of the conservative base really thinks that the world is the way they “remember” it. They think it is still 1976 when whites made up 89% of the electorate. So to them, the coming “demographic death spiral” is just a myth like global warming. The only reason that white voters have been declining is that ACORN has been committing vast voter fraud (even though it no longer exists). And by enacting voter ID laws we will return to the halcyon days of old.

Note: this is not what people like Sean Trende and Byron York are talking about. As I’ve explained before, they are just the intellectual rationalizations of what the Republicans were always going to do. But I think there is much more here than stubbornness from the Republicans. They are just convinced that America is still a white man’s country and that if everything is fair, they win. Personally, I don’t see why so many liberals are trying to educate them on the matter. The time would be better spent trying to educate both parties on some basic economics.

I’ve been having major computer problems today. I think it is the heat. It was 106 today and it is supposed to be—I am not making this up—118 on Tuesday. So if I’m not blogging it is because my internet connection is down or I’ve died of exposure. The latter case is my preference, but it will greatly limit the postings here.

As a result of this, I want to get up a few quick things while I can. On Friday’s Real Time, Bill Maher performed a really good “New Rules.” He cut right to the heart of what we all know is true. All this concern about abortion and birth control and abstinence has nothing whatsoever to do with religion or keeping people safe. It is all about making sluts pay for the sin of enjoying sex. And just look at how sexist it is. Everyone accepts that men will enjoy sex. But if that happens to a woman, she needs to pay. These religious people are small minded and evil.

But Maher’s rant is pretty funny: