Though allegations of voter fraud at the polls are common, they almost always deflate upon further investigation. In 1995, for example, Maryland gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerbrey claimed that her opponent, Democrat Parris Glendening, defeated her through a sophisticated voter-fraud campaign. As evidence of a conspiracy, her supporters cited eighty-nine votes that were supposedly cast by dead voters. Yet, an FBI investigation found no evidence whatsoever of votes being cast in the names of dead Marylanders. The closest they came was “one person who had voted then died a week after the election.”

Similarly, a two-year voter fraud investigation led by Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State Matt Schultz uncovered exactly zero cases in which a voter showed up at the polls and pretended to be another person. Thus, Schultz was unable to find a single instance of voter fraud that would have been prevented by a voter ID law.

—Ian Millhiser
Injustices

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white — Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish — and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs, the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me

What happened in Irving, Texas, yesterday to a 14-year-old Muslim high school freshman is far from the worst instance [of systemic Islamophobia], but it is highly illustrative of the rotted fruit of this sustained climate of cultivated fear and demonization…

But perhaps the worst of all harms is how endless war degrades the culture and populace of the country that perpetrates it. You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school. That’s no more surprising than watching carrots sprout after you plant carrot seeds in fertile ground and then carefully water them. It’s natural and inevitable, not surprising or at all difficult to understand.

—Glenn Greenwald
Arrest of 14-Year-Old Student for Making a Clock: the Fruits of Sustained Fearmongering and Anti-Muslim Animus

The Wall Street Journal decided to take Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign seriously enough to calculate the cost of the programs that he proposed. Their price tag was $18 trillion over the next decade. This is presumably supposed to scare people because, let’s face it $18 trillion is a really big number.

Much of the fright factor disappears when we realize that $15 trillion of this $18 trillion comes from the WSJ’s estimate of the cost of Sanders’ universal Medicare program. That is a considerable chunk of change, but as Kevin Drum and others have pointed out this will not be new money out of people’s pockets. For the most part this is money that employers are now paying for their workers’ health care insurance. Instead, under a universal Medicare system the government would get this money in tax revenue. Since Canada and the other wealthy countries with universal Medicare-type systems all have much lower per capita health care costs than the United States (the average is less than half the cost), in all probability we would be paying less for our health care under the Sanders’ system than we do now.

—Dean Baker
Bernie Sanders and The Wall Street Journal’s $18 Trillion

The x-ray shows a mass that is probably cancer, but we don’t have any good randomized clinical trials showing that your surgeon’s recommendation, operating to remove it, actually causes the remission that tends to follow. However, we do have an extremely clever clinical trial showing conclusively that Botox will make you look younger. So my recommendation is that you wait for some better studies before doing anything about the tumor but that I give you some Botox injections.

—Paul Romer
Botox for Development

To see the limitations… we just need to go back to mid-20th century American politics… Turnout in presidential elections generally exceeded 60%. More stringent campaign finance reforms were in place, and campaigns were a lot cheaper, reducing the role of money in politics. So this was when American politics was actually functional and representative, right?

Hardly. Between 1938 and 1963, Congress was dominated by a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans that consistently thwarted progressive reforms and civil rights legislation. Probably the most important legislation of the period was the Taft-Hartley Act, in which veto-proof bipartisan coalitions reached across the aisle to eviscerate American labor. The statute remains a major source of American inequality today.

—Scott Lemieux
Partisanship Isn’t the Enemy of Reform — It’s a Necessary Condition of It

For normal people, terrorism and wars are purely and only tragedies.

And yet, behind their tears, there seems to be something else. When they think no one is looking, you glimpse another expression flitting across their face. You think it couldn’t be. But — yes, incredibly enough, they’re smiling. Because before the bodies are cold, before the mothers and fathers have stopped shrieking, our leaders are thinking:

This is really a fantastic opportunity.

And for them, it is. It’s an opportunity for them to do whatever they wanted to do before, but couldn’t get away with. It’s an opportunity for them to smear anyone who criticizes them as disloyal. It’s an opportunity for them to become much more powerful than they ever could be in peacetime, to implement whatever their favorite shock doctrine is. Leaders love war. That’s why there’s so much of it.

—Jon Schwarz
An “Enormous Opportunity”: A Short, Awful 9/11 Quiz

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it.

Republicans won middle American votes for years by taking advantage of the fact that their voters didn’t know the difference between an elitist and the actual elite, between a snob and an oligarch. They made sure their voters’ idea of an elitist was Sean Penn hanging out with Hugo Chavez, instead of a Wall Street bank financing the construction of Chinese factories.

—Matt Taibbi
The Republicans Are Now Officially the Party of White Paranoia

This book argues that the current generation of workers and trade unionists, like other generations before it has come face-to-face with a long-standing inheritance: a democracy — born in the epic fire of civil war — that safeguards the individual worker’s right to access the American Dream while simultaneously denying a collective route to its fulfillment.

—Cedric de Leon
The Origins of Right to Work

H/T: Erik Loomis

It is well established that unions provide benefits to workers — that they raise wages for their members (and even for nonmembers). They can help reduce inequality.

Their most interesting explanation is that unions are effective at pushing the political system to deliver policies — like a higher minimum wage and greater spending on schools and other government programs — that broadly benefit workers. Perhaps not surprisingly, three cities that appear to reflect the union effect — San Francisco, Seattle and New York — are all jurisdictions where the minimum wage is rising substantially (though for New York it is only for workers in fast-food chains.).

—Noam Scheiber
How an Area’s Union Membership Can Predict Children’s Advancement