I wrote that liberals have trouble handling authority. In general, we are much more comfortable fantasizing about power; the sensation of holding and using it seems to unsettle us, and we curl into ourselves with disappointment. Conservatives displayed far less grumpiness toward George W Bush than liberals have toward Obama until the very end, when Bush’s presidency collapsed so irretrievably the right had to hastily abandon its largely worshipful pose and write him out of the conservative tradition in order to contain the fallout.

Conservatives in the Freedom Caucus suffer from a similar but different problem: they do not seem capable of comprehending a world in which they exert less than total power. This failure to compute leads to bursts of angry behavior that is ineffectual by design. No scalp will satisfy, not when any new head starts to look like another scalp. No Freedom Caucus member who finds himself in the party leadership can be anything but a sellout, since betrayal is the only explanation for the failure of the right-wing agenda.

—Jonathan Chait
The House’s Right Flank Finally Got Boehner’s Scalp. So Why Doesn’t It Feel Good?

Lobbyists enjoy access to establishment politicians of both major parties. But Boehner leaves behind a career that is marked by a particularly extreme coziness with K Street.

As he raised millions from corporate political action committees, Boehner encouraged lobbyists to have a direct influence over the policy process. Under Speaker Boehner, the reverse revolving door became a blur, with more and more corporate lobbyists hired to manage the day-to-day business of key congressional committees and to serve as senior staff.

—Lee Fang
Lobbyists Mourn House Speaker John Boehner’s Departure

This new culture made the Comanche the dominant empire on the 18th and early 19th century Great Plains. At their height, around 1850, the Comanchería extended from the edge of the southern Rockies into central Texas and central Kansas. They raided much further, especially into Mexico, where they frequently went as far south as Durango to take captives and horses. This went far to shape the region. The Spanish and then the Mexicans wanted to move north but could not defeat the Comanches. The need for a buffer zone helped convince Mexico to invite Americans into Texas, who then became the victims of Comanche raiding. But the lack of Mexican settlement meant that the US could easily take the northern half of Mexico during the Mexican War. But they then had to conquer the Comanches, which was extremely difficult. As late as 1860, white expansion in Texas was quite limited due to Comanche raiding.

Undermining traditional ways of work would remain central to the post-conquest strategy of dealing with Native Americans. The Dawes Act of 1887 served to both alienate reservation land from Indians while also forcing them into the subsistence farming lifestyle white Americans had decided was appropriate for Native Americans. By 1920, there were only 1,500 Comanche left in the wake of the destruction of their culture through conquest, land dispossession, Indian schools, and the despair all of this created. Like most other tribes however, Comanche numbers grew after that and continue to grow today, although with a very different set of cultural traditions and work life than that of the past.

—Erik Loomis
This Day in Labor History: 28 September 1874

We can apparently credit Pope Francis for at least one good deed on his American tour: he has ended the suffering of an unhappy man. The miserable speakership of John Boehner is over.

It’s long past time for Boehner to get the hell out of Washington and settle into the plush industry “consulting” gig that surely awaits him.

—Alex Pareene
Don’t Cry For John Boehner

This is an old drug. It’s a generic drug — there’s no patent on it. Ordinarily, we’re looking at high priced drugs because you have a drug company like Gilead Sciences owning a patent on Sovaldi — the hepatitis C drug. They did develop that — or played a role in it (that’s an issue) — but they played a role in developing it — they brought it to market. They’re ostensibly recovering research costs. There’s at least some truth to that. In this case, what they discovered — this hedge fund guy discovered — was that you have an old generic drug that is not widely used, but it is very important for the people who need it. It’s a life and death proposition — no easy substitute. [The company that makes Daraprim] is the sole producer. They have a de facto monopoly.

The more typical story has to do with how we finance research more generally. And I meantion in the case of Sovaldi — the hepatitis C drug — from Gilead Sciences. There’s charging $84,000 a year for a treatment. The generic price for that would be less than a thousand. Now that speaks to how we finance research and I think that’s very, very problematic. But it’s at least a very different question than what this hedge fund guy did. Which is really just basically price gouging — pure and simple.

—Dean Baker
Interviewed on CounterSpin

The Hepatitis-C Virus (HCV) drugs of Gilead Sciences are the poster cases of monopolistic abuse. Gilead owns the patent for the molecule Sofosbuvir, which is sold in two formulations under the brand names Sovaldi and Harvoni. Gilead charges the federal government $84,000 ($1,000 per pill) for a full course of Sovaldi and $94,500 for Harvoni, even though production costs are under $200 per course of treatment. The company is making a killing and, incidentally, adds insult to injury by booking its outlandish US profits in an Irish tax haven.

While the government buys tens of thousands of HCV treatments from Gilead, it is also forced to ration its purchases because of budget constraints. Hundreds of thousands of HCV-infected Americans, both on and off government programs, are unable to obtain the medicines. Many of those being turned away are US veterans who survived their tours in Iraq or Afghanistan only to be killed by Gilead’s not-so-friendly fire.

—Jeffrey Sachs
Rational Drug Pricing

The close US/Saudi alliance and the massive amount of weapons and intelligence lavished on the regime in Riyadh by the West is one of the great unmentionables in Western discourse…

As the always-expanding “War on Terror” enters its 14th year, the ostensible target — radical, violent versions of Islam — is fueled far more by the US’s closest allies than any of the countries the US has been fighting under the “War on Terror” banner. Beyond that, the alliance proves the complete absurdity of believing that the US and UK’s foreign policies, let alone their various wars, have anything to do with protecting human rights or subverting tyranny and fanaticism. And it renders a complete laughingstock any attempts to depict the US government as some sort of crusader for freedom and democracy or whatever other pretty goals are regularly attributed to it by its helpful press.

—Glenn Greenwald
US State Department “Welcomes” News That Saudi Arabia Will Head UN Human Rights Panel

1. People from every race, all over the world, convert into Judaism. They’re as Jewish as any other Jew, even though they obviously keep the race into which they were born. Beyond that, there are people born into Judaism from different races all over the world, such as Ethiopian Jews. Beyond that, whether to observe the religious dictates of Judaism is a choice which every person makes.

   So it’s wildly simplistic, at best, to describe “Jewish” as a race which one cannot and does not choose.

2. Although it’s not a perfect equivalency, the designation “Muslim” has very similar attributes to the ones you’re ascribing to “Jews.” Countless people all over the world self-identify as “Muslim” even though they have little to no adherence to the tenets of Islam. They mean it as a cultural signifier or representative of their heritage: the community and culture into which they were born, very similar to the way some non-religious people still identify as “Jewish”: as a cultural or ethnic signifier.

   Just as German Jews could not have chosen to become non-Jewish in the eyes of many, so, too, are Muslims incapable of becoming non-Muslim in the eyes of many. No matter their belief system, they retain their names, their appearance, their heritage and other attributes which bigots associate with being Muslim — just as was true of Jews.

   In sum, maligning “Muslims” is about more than maligning the doctrine of Islam, just as maligning “Jews” has always been about more than maligning the doctrine of Judaism.

3. The argument you’re implicitly making — that it’s better to discriminate against people for choices they make than in-born attributes — is one very familiar to LGBT people, since that’s the argument long used to justify anti-gay discrimination (“it’s a choice”).

   But if being LGBT were actually a choice… would that make discrimination against LGBT people more justifiable? I don’t think so and never did. Whether being LGBT is a choice or not never mattered to me in the slightest in demonstrating that it was wrong to discriminate against them.

4. Finally, purely for the sake of argument, let’s indulge this tendentious distinction you’re making between Jews (not a choice) and Muslims (a choice):

   Suppose the anti-Jewish speakers in my hypotheticals had said at the end: “by the way, by ‘Jew,’ I don’t mean people who were born into this group through no choice/fault of their own; I simply mean ‘those who are adherents to the religion known as Judaism.’ That is who I intend to malign and want to ban from public office.”

   Would that really be acceptable to you?

—Glenn Greenwald
The Anti-Muslim Controversies of the Last Week, Reimagined