Officer Richard Recine Shouldn’t Have Been Fired

Posted on 07 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

What is wrong with the police in Helmetta, New Jersey?! As you may have heard there was an incident where one of their part-time officers said, “Obama has decimated the frigging Constitution, so I don’t give a damn. Because if he doesn’t have to follow the Constitution, we don’t have to.” But that’s not what I’m talking about. The officer, Richard Recine, has since claimed that he was being sarcastic. And you all know me: I’m not keen on the law enforcement community and I am usually the first to blast them. But I actually believe Recine. Well, mostly.

If you watch the whole video, you can see a situation developing. Steve Wronko is some kind of animal rights activist and he has taken to shooting video inside of animal shelters. And like most politically involved people, he’s passionate and annoying. Actually, he’s more annoying than that. Because he doesn’t seem as interested in doing what he came there to do as he is in having this confrontation with the officer. He has been given the okay to go around and collect his video footage. Yet he doesn’t.

So I can see that Recine is getting more and more agitated. But I’m so used to police agitation leading to choke holds, tasers, and hails of bullets that this confrontation seems downright charming. At one point, the Police Director comes in to see what’s going on. Wronko asks him his name, and the man says, “Bob.” Again, this is not usual for a police department. Usually it is something like, “Police Director Bob Manney!” Or worse: something coarse and belligerent.

Then Manney says that if Wronko is being disruptive, he will have to leave. And Recine comes to his defense, “No. He’s not being disruptive.” But soon enough, it all does get a bit unpleasant as the police escort Wronko out of the building. They had a disagreement about exactly what Wronko’s rights were. But what’s interesting is that earlier on, Recine had okayed for Wronko to record in the building with the animal shelter, but not the offices. As far as I could tell, Wronko was making the argument that if a building was public, he could go anywhere he wants. I think that’s a misreading of the law, but I’m all for people pushing the limits of access. I just don’t see this really being the way to do it: waving around papers with “case law” in front of police officers.

Regardless, I thought the whole thing was handled pretty well. In general, the police are not interested in the Constitution. The Constitution is not a simple document and it has over 200 years of decisions based upon that. I’m sure it is annoying to the police to have people quoting the Fourth Amendment to them. So I think what happens here is that Officer Recine is annoyed and so he says, “We don’t need no stinking Constitution.” Whether Recine actually thinks that Obama has “decimated” or not, I can’t say. He claims to be a Democrat, and he may well have been conflating the conservative ideologues who claim this about Obama and this guy who seems equally extreme. It hardly matters. It is certainly true that Recine did not literally mean that the department didn’t have to follow the Constitution.

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So now Recine has been fired. I think that’s a shame. We live in a nation where police officers kill children because they think their toy guns are real. They kill old women wielding vegetable peelers. They suffocate men suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes. And in these cases, it is almost always found that the police acted properly. But here, we have an officer who is more patient than I probably would have been. And he’s fired because he makes at worst a provocative, but not at all intimidating, comment.

So to answer my original question, the only problem I see with the police in Helmetta, New Jersey is that they fired Recine. Otherwise, I wish more departments behaved as well.

Rick Perlstein on the Tea Party

Posted on 07 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

With all the talk about Rick Perlstein’s new book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, it got me looking for some lectures by him that I could listen to while I made dinner.[1] And I came upon this conference at Berkeley he was part of back in 2010. His talk is called, “The Tea Parties Now.” I’ve embedded it below and it is well worth listening to the whole thing. But a couple of things stuck out to me.

Left vs Right Wing Reactions

Perhaps the biggest thing was the idea that government authorities have generally been concerned about left wing movements but only in an indirect way. The concern is that left wing movements might cause a right wing backlash that would be hard to control. To some extent, I think this is just a convenient excuse for people who always want the status quo, no matter what it is at any time. And so these people have come up with this as a reason to justify suppressing entirely reasonable and nonviolent left wing movements. But I don’t think that’s all.

For a long time, I’ve been worried about the right wing gun movement. I don’t mean to be cute, but as a movement, it has a hair trigger. It is a revolutionary movement. And it could go off over the slightest of things. And we saw a bit of this recently at the Bundy Ranch. Now, it’s also true that I think these people are mostly chick hawks. But things could easily and quickly get out of hand. And this is more generally true of right wing movements like the Tea Party. These are people who all convinced (as they have been for at least the last six years) that communism is coming to America any day now.

I know the caricature of the left wing revolutionary. But these are all based on teenage hippies from the sixties. Kids do stupid things all the time. In general, although the (far) left is in a state of constant disappointment, we see the erosion of our preferred country as a gradual thing. For example, in 2012, we didn’t think that if Romney became president it would mean the end of freedom in America, even though what he planned to do was far more radical than anything Obama ever even mentioned. Those on the far right see catastrophe just around the corner, so it isn’t hard to imagine them reacting quickly and violently to actual liberal policy suggestions, much less implementations.

What Is the Tea Party?

The other thing he had to say that stuck out was what I thought was a pretty good description of what the Tea Party is all about. In the talk, he discusses how similar the movement is to the John Birch Society of the 1950s and 1960s. I’ve long noticed this. I first noticed it when I started hearing Tea Party folks talking about the dangers of fluoridated water. What’s wacky about this is that this interest was at the start of the Tea Party movement, but it was what got the John Birch Society thrown out of the mainstream conservative movement in the 1960s. It was brilliantly lampooned in Dr Strangelove:

So this is always what I most associate the Tea Party with. And it is certainly true that most of their concerns are no more reasonable than those of Brigadier General Jack Ripper. But Perlstein gets at the same thing in a more (but not completely) serious way:

Why is America like this? Why is the white American middle class so susceptible to rage—so susceptible to a message that they are somehow being profoundly dispossessed—so susceptible to the poetics of scapegoating and cultural demagoguery? My answer these days have a lot to do with a certain kind of psychoanalytic trauma that comes not from being not dependent on government but on being dependent on government, in a country where being dependent on government is shameful and not valued—a learned helplessness that comes from not being helped—not being taken care of… [In other words, they pretend independence because they are dependent but aren’t getting the help they need.]

Jefferson Cowie in another great book, Stayin’ Alive, talks about the characteristic note of country music as a paradoxical combination of rebellion and patriotic nationalism. “The state is his enemy, the nation his mystical identity.” So if I can do a recitation [of] “God Bless the USA,” which I think has had just a extraordinary life—a country song by Lee Greenwood that I’m sure everyone would know the words to at any Tea Party anywhere in America.

If tomorrow all the things were gone I’d worked for all my life
And I had to start again with just my children and my wife
I’d thank my lucky stars to be living here today
Because the flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away

And I’m proud to be an American where as least I know I’m free
[Won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me]
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land God bless the USA

The storyline is basically, “Yes, in America, you—interpolated as the white male patriarch—can be dispossessed of your livelihood at any time. And that’s fate! That’s just it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. But at least, like W E B Du Bois talked about the psychic wage of whiteness that white southerners had that at least they weren’t black, there’s this psychic wage patriotism—that this is still the best possible country no matter what, because one can remain free even after one’s boss fires you without cause—fires you for starting a union—and takes away all the things that you’ve worked for all your life. There is nothing in the mystically true America that can hold you back from deliverance. But America is polluted by its internal enemies. And that sounds like a Tea Partier to me.

I’d go further. That sounds like just about any conservative to me. Remember just five days after 9/11, Andrew Sullivan writing, “The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount a fifth column.” And that’s from an Obama voter: an extremely moderate conservative.

There’s an obvious retort to this: but liberals think that conservatives want to destroy the country! That’s not really true. Liberals think that conservatives will destroy the country. We think that conservative middle class voters manage to vote against their economic interest in the name of social issues that don’t really matter and dog whistle politics that they aren’t even aware of. And we think they are led by politicians who are even more cynical than our own and who are incompetent. We also think they are revolutionaries, who have a mythical view of America that never actually existed and cannot become a reality. But we don’t think conservatives want to destroy the country—just that they will if given a chance.

Watch the whole thing. I’ve cued it to the start of his talk:

[1] For the record: mushroom quiche from The Moosewood Cookbook. You see, it’s true: real men don’t eat quiche. I’m so not a real man that I cook it.

Josh Barro’s Honeydew Melon Apologia

Posted on 07 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

I’m very fond of Josh Barro, but it seems that I only write about him when I’m angry at him. But today, I’m not really angry at him. Over at The Upshot, he wrote, That Honeydew Melon Looks Good, but Does Anyone Eat It? And yes, he does some honeydew melon apologetics, but you can tell he’s not that into it.

Let’s get something straight: it is clear that Barro started researching his article with a clear head. But somewhere along the line, he was assimilated by the honeydew Borg. Because he rightly notes that the purpose of this lesser melon in our society is to sit on fruit trays next to “watermelon, cantaloupe, and pineapple.” And by the end of any event, there well be not a trace of red, orange, and yellow. All that will remain will be vast tracts of green. If a starving man ran into the room at that point, he would go up to the tray, see only honeydew melons and say, “I’m good.”

And why is it that no one eats the honeydew melon? Because it tastes like green cardboard. I know what happens because I do it myself. We grab a small paper plate and place three pieces each of watermelon and cantaloupe, two pieces of pineapple (because there is never as much pineapple and we don’t want to look selfish), and one piece of honeydew melon. Why one piece? I think for two reasons. First, we have this idea that we should eat our “greens.” Yes, we know that this refers to broccoli, but we figure that since honeydew melons don’t taste good, we ought to get some credit for it. Second, we are optimists. We think that maybe this time the green melon will be better. It never is.

But Barro, ever the iconoclast decides to eat a honeydew melon on one of the two nonconsecutive days of year when they are actually in season. You’ve got to remember that Barro is really, his heart, a liberal, but he insists upon staying in the Republican Party as a kind of protest. As if any of the Republicans actually listen to him! As it is, he’s more liberal than the last two Democratic presidents. He’s the kind of Republican only a Democrat can love. And that means he’s no kind of Republican! Anyway, so he eats his “almost perfect” honeydew melon and announces, “It didn’t rock my world, but it was as tasty as a high-quality cantaloupe.”

I don’t actually know how to take this. I have a hard time believing that any fruit could rock my world. And “tasty” is a word normally reserved for describing food that a friend worked really hard on but isn’t that good. I think this is just his way of saying, “Yeah, the melon tasted better than cardboard.” But the fact remains: honeydew melons are never great. They are just sometimes okay—good enough—edible—you might even say, “Tasty!”

So okay, despite Barro’s obvious attempt at apologetics on behalf of the ATFGA (American Tasteless Fruit Growers Association), we can all agree that honeydew melons are never worth buying unless your grocer specifically tells you, “There’s something wrong with the honeydew melons; they taste good for some reason.” And even then, what is the point? Cantaloupe is usually better. But Barro is quite right that cantaloupe is also poor when out of season. I have a general rule that I apply to all fruits (even the ones you don’t think of as fruits like corn):

Only buy fruit when it is cheap.

I recently bought a cantaloupe for 25¢, and it was one of the best ones I’ve ever had. I know it doesn’t make sense, but the economics of it is pretty simple. When fruit is expensive, it is because there isn’t much of a supply of it. And that means it is out of season. And that means it was probably shipped from another hemisphere. Trust me: it will suck, especially given that they paid a bunch for it and it is worse than it is when it is cheap.

But let’s go back to that fruit tray business. The problem here is that in general, the people who eat the fruit trays are not the same as the people who buy the fruit trays. Even if it is for a family gathering, the person who buys the tray is the host who will be too busy hosting to eat a bunch of fruit. So no one involved in the economic side of it cares. The seller provides a good looking tray and that’s pretty much all the buyer cares about too. What’s more, if there is no honeydew melon, there will always be one freak there who says, “Why isn’t there any honeydew melon? It’s my favorite!”

More important, the seller has an extra incentive to have honeydew melon on the tray besides having some green to go along with the red, orange, and yellow: honeydew melons are the cheapest. And note: if they wanted green on the tray, they could use grapes or kiwi. And how about blueberries to get a little purple. No, cost is king!

So I don’t think honeydew melons are going away anytime soon. They are the equivalent of the lettuce bed on a meat tray: cheap filler that adds some color while still being technically edible. But if you are at the grocery store and you see a honeydew melon: stop! According to Produce Pete:

Unless you live in California, however, a ripe honeydew before August or after October is as rare as a blue moon. Because ripe ones are fragile and hard to ship, 99 percent of those you see most the year have been picked green, and they’ll never ripen.

That’s at most two months folks! Cantaloupe is good from June through September. That’s four months. The truth is, you should stay away from all these fruits outside of summer. You can get all the fruits you need in the winter by drinking wine. And if you serve wine at your events, no one will care about which fruits you do or don’t have.

Reform Republicans Only Sound Reasonable—It’s in the Job Description

Posted on 07 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Ross Douthat’s widely mocked column. I was following off Ezra Klein’s idea that Presidents are more powerful when Congress decides to do nothing. I wrote, Republican Delusion Empowers Obama. Well, since Douthat’s first article, he has had a bit of a back and forth with Brian Beutler at New Republic (among others), and I think it is really enlightening about the broader issue that all of this brings up: Republican dysfunction and how the reform aspects of the party are nothing of the kind.

In this case, we get to the bottom of how even the most reasonable conservatives are still just as crazy as the Republican Party itself. Douthat is considered a leading light among Republican reformers. In his article Reformish Conservatives, Ryan Cooper gave Douthat a score of 5 out of 10 in the level of his reform ideas. But remember, Cooper is being very nice, or at least grading on a curve. Republican apologist David Frum got a score of 7. So make of that what you will.

As far as I’m concerned, what makes them Republican “reformers” is that they don’t spit bile. It isn’t that they really want the party to change its policies as that they want the party to talk nice. And Douthat does indeed talk nice. So he got some push back for his Sunday column saying that what Obama was going to do would be “Tyranny! Tyranny I tell you!” This caused him to come out with another, rather long, article where he responded to his critics, Anatomy of a Power Grab. In it, he admitted that his column had been “a little on the shrill side.”

That gives away the game right there, I’m afraid. Douthat admits that he forgot what his job description is. He’s supposed to make right wing talking points sound reasonable. And so in the blog post, he is back to form: telling it like it isn’t in a reasonable sounding way. But Beutler is there to catch the heart of Douthat’s argument. Basically, Douthat is arguing that the current DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is illegal. If he isn’t, then Douthat’s argument is just about norms and it becomes a mess that absolutely cannot be addressed until we know exactly what Obama wants to do. So I have to assume that Douthat, just like the Republican crazies in the House, thinks that what Obama is doing right now is illegal. Beutler:

Clearly Douthat would prefer it if Congress tied [the President’s] hands. But a column urging the Senate to pass Steve King’s plan to end DACA wouldn’t have been as tantalizing as one warning that the specter of Caesarism is haunting America.

I think it is more correct to say that a column in support of right wing nut job Steve King would be an act of Reformish Republican malpractice. His job description clearly states that he is supposed to push unreasonable conservative ideas, but dress them up in nice words and formal argument so that they seem reasonable. Otherwise, what is Douthat doing at The New York Times? The Steve Kings and the Louie Gohmerts can speak for themselves. And Douthat knows this. If he stopped cloaking his misogyny and homophobia in the form of “saving the middle class family,” he’d be out of a job. And I don’t think Breitbart.com is hiring right now.

(Just kidding! Breitbart.com is always hiring when gay-hating misogynists are available!)

The Modern Justice of Elizabeth Bathory

Posted on 07 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

Elizabeth Bathory Here is a little bit of trivia that I didn’t know: when Billie Burke (who has a birthday today) played Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz, she was 55 years old. I suppose that little voice of hers makes her seem younger. And it isn’t like we get any closeups. Regardless, she was a huge star, especially on Broadway. She had quite a career. But I decided that I had to talk about a really vile person for today’s birthday.

On this day in 1560, Dick Cheney, I mean, Elizabeth Bathory was born. Between 1590 and 1610, she is thought to have tortured and murdered 650 girls. She was a countess in a very powerful family in the Kingdom of Hungary. She was married at the age of 15 but didn’t have any children until the age of 25, when she popped out 7 babies rather quickly. Maybe something snapped in her, because this was roughly the time that she started her killing spree.

With the help of at least four servants, young women were tricked or abducted to wherever Bathory was—she apparently did her torturing in various locations. According to testimony, initially the victims were peasant girls who were offered jobs at Bathory’s wedding home, Csejte Castle. But you know how it is: there are only so many peasant girls available. After a while, she started preying on “lesser gentry.” Think of police abuse: as long as it happens to the poor, it doesn’t matter. When it happens to the middle class, there is grumbling. When it happens to the rich, well, things change.

By 1602, it was already widely known what Bathory was doing. At that point, a Lutheran minister started publicly accusing her and also filing complaints in Vienna. At that point, the authorities took notice and sprang into action—eight years later. Bathory and four servants were arrested in 1610. After the trial, all the servants will executed. One, who had not cooperated had “her eyes gouged out and her breasts removed before being burned at the stake.” Two servants who did cooperate had “their fingers ripped off their hands with hot pincers” before being burned at the stake. And the last servant who was thought to have been bullied by the others was simply beheaded.

Bathory, of course, was never brought to trial. It was thought that it would look bad for the Hungarian aristocracy. So she was placed on house arrest until she died four years later. I think the whole story encapsulates human culture. The servants were largely powerless, so they were tortured and killed by the authority of the state. This is no different than Bathory’s torture and murder of her peasant and “lesser gentry” victims. At the same time, the state didn’t really care about the victims. What Bathory was doing was widely known for a decade before the authorities did anything. In the end, they pat themselves on the back, torture and kill the politically weak and ignore the crimes of the politically powerful. It would be one thing if anything had changed over the last 400 years. But the basic dynamics are the same.

Happy birthday Dick Cheney, I mean, Elizabeth Bathory!

Wall St Says Economic Inequality Is Bad

Posted on 06 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

As you should know, Michael Hiltzik is one of the best political columnists around. But he works on the west coast, so he is largely ignored by the New York punditocracy. But he’s great. That’s why he’s listed on the right under “Daily” (Economy Hub). What Jonathan Bernstein is to political science reporting, Hiltzik is to economics reporting. Except that Hiltzik is actually a whole lot more fun. Anyway, yesterday he wrote a very interesting and maybe even hopeful article, Dire Warning from Wall Street: Income Inequality Hurts US Growth.

The article refers to a report out of Standard & Poor’s. I know what you’re thinking, “Weren’t they one of the companies that were giving high ratings to all that subprime garbage?” Yes they were! But you have to understand: they were paid to do that; this isn’t a paid gig. The point is that Standard & Poor’s is corrupt, not incompetent. So you should pay attention when Chief US Economist Beth Ann Bovino writes, How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, And Possible Ways To Change The Tide.

Beth Ann Bovino Oh. My. God. I know what you’re thinking, “Thomas Piketty must have gotten to her!” But no. That’s not it at all. This has all been pretty clear for a long time. Think about cell phones. First, if only one or two people had them, no one would care. We would call them walkie-talkies and move one. What’s more, they would be really expensive. You’d have to have cell phone towers all over the world just in case one of the two people who had a phone happened to be there. So it is nice to have a lot of people who make enough money to make things like cell phones and the internet cheap and interesting.

What’s more, there is the issue of having people to sell stuff to. I walked through our local JC Penney this afternoon and it was like a ghost town. Retailers like that are really hurting because there is less and less of a middle class. It seems like we are headed to a country where there are a couple of Tiffany & Co stores and thousands of Dollar Trees. That’s not stable, but our economy is getting more and more like that. Even Kmart, considered really low market when I was a kid, is having problems. The thing is that rich people own stores like JC Penney and Kmart and they can’t keep making money if no one has the cash to shop at those places.

This is one of the reasons I don’t understand why the rich have become so focused on the short term. Their obsession with short-term profits is bad for them long-term. I would think that they would be the most vocal supporters of things like welfare (Food stamps!) and unemployment and education and all those things that allow the middle class to thrive. But in general, they aren’t. Maybe it isn’t that surprising, though. In my experience, people in business are often clueless about how the macroeconomy works.

Regardless of this, I’ve also made the argument that the rich should be worried about social breakdown, The Revolution Will Be Televised. Well, Bovino makes the same argument. Michael Hiltzik explains:

Sounding a broader alarm, they observe that inequality “may also spur political instability… The affluent may exercise disproportionate influence on the political process, or the needs of the less affluent may grow so severe as to make additional cuts to fiscal stabilizers [eg Unemployment; SNAP] that operate automatically in a downturn politically unviable.”

Bovino even offers some suggestions for changing things. She says that we ought to increase access to education. While I agree with that, it isn’t the core of what is wrong in America. And I would really like people to decouple education from “earning potential.” A democracy needs educated people just to survive. We here in America take our democracy for granted. It isn’t. And we are seeing the results of that.

She recommends things like spending on healthcare, but not (I suppose it is too radical) a guaranteed minimum income. But she does suggest increasing taxes on the rich. That is, I’m afraid, the key to the matter. But I fear that the rich will only allow that after things get much worse.

But there is no doubt, it is nice to hear stuff like this coming out of Wall Street. It is a good start.

Vote ID Is Not About Voter Fraud

Posted on 06 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

Jonathan Bernstein just wrote yet another in what has become of political reporting genre that I hate, How to Target Nonexistent Fraud. It follows on Justin Levitt’s Wonk Blog article, A Comprehensive Investigation of Voter Impersonation Finds 31 Credible Incidents Out of One Billion Ballots Cast. Hooray! There is no in-person voter fraud! Or, to be more exact, this kind of voter fraud occurs at a rate of 0.000003%. The effect of miscounting—even in recounts—is undoubtedly larger. So voter ID laws don’t make any sense.

In fact, Bernstein looks at it from a cost-benefit perspective:

Generally, there probably is a trade-off in some cases between making it as easy as possible for legitimate voters to cast their ballots and making fraud difficult. But in the specific case of voter ID, given it’s dubious value, there isn’t much of a trade-off. Such measures do nothing about real election fraud, so if they keep legitimate voters away from the polls—let’s say if they keep more than 31 legitimate voters away over 15 years or so—then they are a bad idea.

Okay, sure. But this kind of analysis legitimizes racist conduct. The term “voter fraud” is the newest form of dog whistle politics. You may remember that in 2009, many conservatives were claiming that Obama only won the presidency because of voter fraud committed by ACORN. Many even made that claim in 2012, even though ACORN did not exist because of a concerted, dishonest, and highly successful attack on the group. This is the basis of the current conservative freak out over voter fraud.

Now I understand that the average voter ID enthusiast doesn’t consciously think that these laws are going to “get the darkies!” But in their mind, that is exactly the kind of voter who they see as committing fraud. This is what’s going on with Chris McDaniel and his outrage over the Mississippi Republican Senate primary. In the first draft of a press release, it referred repeatedly to “black Democrats” wrongly voting in the election. So even for the Republican base, this is a racial issue.

For the Republicans who are pushing this, it is explicitly, but strategically, racist. That is to say that they know how their arguments will play with the base, but they don’t necessarily have anything against blacks and other minorities, except so far as they tend to vote for the Democratic Party. But even if we take the racial element out of this, the point of voter ID laws is to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters. And that is all that has to be said.

So every time someone writes a column trying to show that in-person voter fraud—the only kind of fraud that is addressed by voter ID laws—is not real, they are implying that voter ID laws are being passed because people are really worried about voter fraud. They aren’t. This is just a mercenary anti-democratic effort by Republicans to keep Democrats from voting. No amount of evidence like that produced by Justin Levitt will ever convince the Republicans that voter ID laws are not a good idea for suppressing Democratic Party voting.

Congressional Polls Show Bad Economy

Posted on 06 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

That is a segment from last night’s All In with Ezra Klein sitting in for Chris Hayes. It was called Congress: Less Popular Than Head Lice? It is based upon a Washington Post–ABC News poll that found that not only is Congress unpopular, but for the fist time, a majority of people say that they are unhappy with the job their own representatives are doing. This is news because normally people hate Congress but love their Congress members. Now I’m going to explain why none of this matters.

Let me start with some statistics that Klein provides later in the segment. In a NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll of Americans: 71% say the country is headed in the wrong direction; 60% described the country as in a state of decline; 76% are not confident their children’s generation will be better off than their own. These statistics mean pretty much nothing. The last one isn’t quite so bad because it implies economic conditions, but even it isn’t explicit. Overall, these are the vaguest of questions.

What does it mean that the country is headed in the wrong direction? What direction is that? I agree: the country is headed in the wrong direction. By that, I mean that we are headed toward ever more inequality which is destroying our democracy. But other people think the country is headed in the wrong direction because women don’t wear dresses anymore and minorities demand things like voting rights. Similarly, is the country in decline? I say yes! But I say this because, like all empires, we are focused on our military and maintaining our power instead of just doing the work of the people and trying to make everyone’s life better. But other people think the country is in decline because same sex marriage is becoming a national right and woman can still get birth control pills.

This same dynamic is going on with the polls about Congress. I don’t like Congress because the House is controlled by the Republicans, the Senate can largely be ground to a halt by the Republicans, and many of the Democrats in both chambers are far too conservative and timid for my tastes. But your average Fox News viewer would say, “I don’t like Congress because Republicans in the House voted with Democrats to raise the Debt Ceiling.” About the only thing that historically low approval of Congress means is that the Republicans have been so good at blocking everything that low-information voters just have a vague idea that Congress isn’t doing much.

The statistic about being unhappy with our own representatives is different. But it is no more meaningful. It is a cliche, but it is true: politics is the art of the possible. The question on the ballot is never the choice between a real candidate and some idealized candidate who does everything exactly as you want. The question on the ballot is two candidates, each with their own flaws and each who will disappoint us once they are serving. Consider that Obama’s low 40% approval rating is about the same as it was going into the 2012 presidential race—which he won.

In addition to this, I wonder just how much this disapproval of “my own representatives” is driven by the relentless push of conservative media that everything is terrible and if the Republicans in Congress would just stand up to Obama and crash the global economy, everything would be perfect. In other words, I’d like to know if all the extra discontentment isn’t coming primarily from the right. In case you haven’t noticed, it is primarily conservatives who are always complaining that everything is going to hell—you know, the ones who love the country and are so patriotic:

There’s something else very interesting in this segment. The people overall dislike the Republicans in Congress a whole lot more than the Democrats. But they are pretty much evenly split over who they want to control Congress. Now, those stats are from two different polls, so you never know. But apparently the reason it is so different between who the people blame for the problems and who they want to be in control is that they want the Republicans to be a check on Obama’s power. (This is madness, as I explained yesterday, Republican Delusion Empowers Obama.) These are the same people who claim they are upset that nothing gets done in Washington. But when given the chance to elect a Congress that would get things done, they decide it is best to vote for a check against that Kenyan socialist in the White House.

The bottom line is that none of these polls actually mean anything other than that the economy sucks and so people are unhappy. Anything else they demonstrate (like the irrationality of people) has long been established.

George Jung Is Free

Posted on 06 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

George Jung Happy Hiroshima Day! On this day 69 years ago, we dropped a bomb on one of the few remaining cities in Japan. If we had been on the losing side of World War II, there would have been war crimes trials and a number of Americans would have been put to death. The truth of the matter is that at the end of the war, the Japanese army was doing pretty well. We had spent the war focused on destroying the Japanese civilian population. That is, of course, what modern war is—going back at least to Sherman’s March to the Sea. The idea is that the civilian population provides supplies to the army and is thus an appropriate target. So much for Just War theory. Anyway, I think today and Saturday (the day we bombed Nagasaki) should be national holidays so we could spend the day begging forgiveness.

The drug smuggler George Jung is 72 today. Jung is an interesting guy—clever but clueless. He was a recreational cannabis user in his native Massachusetts and like many others, he did some dealing on the side. But he thought big and so before long he was transporting large amounts of the drug from California to New England. We he maxed that out, he started flying drugs out of Mexico in stolen planes. But as usual, he was caught when one of the people in his large network was caught and rolled over on him.

He reportedly told the judge that it made no sense to send a man to prison “for crossing an imaginary line with a bunch of plants.” This is what I mean by him being clueless. He’s right, of course. It does make no sense. But if there is one thing my own clueless mind has learned over the last fifty years, it is that there is nothing the power elite care about as much as imaginary lines and imaginary crimes. Our modern drug and immigration laws are just the modern equivalent of ancient religious laws. Jung’s crime was not drug transportation; it was apostasy.

But his time in prison wasn’t wasted. Jung gained a contact, Carlos Lehder. (Interestingly, back 2008, Lehder’s lawyers had to file a habeas corpus petition because the federal prison system had “lost” him.) Lehder introduced Jung to the Medellin Cartel, for whom Jung transported cocaine. But by the late 1970s, he was back to being a freelancer. And in 1994, he was arrested for possession of almost a ton of cocaine and sentenced to 60 years in jail.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Remember Ethan Couch, the 16-year-old who got no jail time at all after killing four pedestrians because he had the made up disease “affluenza”? Jung got 60 years for crossing an imaginary line with a plant product that people were eager to buy. Of course, it is important to remember that Couch was part of the power elite and those he killed were just little people. Jung, although rich, was still an outsider. But this is why I have written many times before that in our society, doing drugs is worse than murder.

Anyway, I wouldn’t even be writing about Jung today, except that on 2 June 2014, he was released from prison after serving 20 years. He is currently living in a halfway house in California. He has been working with writers to novelize his life. He has long been something of a celebrity, especially after Johnny Depp played him in the film Blow. So I’m sure that unlike most people caught up in our criminal “justice” system, he will be fine. I wish him well.

Happy birthday George Jung!

Republican Delusion Empowers Obama

Posted on 05 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

Ezra Klein made an interesting point in an article at Vox today, Why the President Becomes More Powerful When Congress Fails. It is a push back against Ross Douthat’s recent widely mocked column where he complains about the presidential overreach that he thinks Obama is going to perform. Klein noted that Douthat is right that congressional inaction doesn’t tell the president what to do, but it also doesn’t tell the president what not to do. Congress is dysfunctional and part of that dysfunction is that it can’t really stop the president from acting.

Implicit in Klein’s article is the idea that Congress actually wants the President to do things that it thinks it can’t be seen doing. Or to put it more correctly: Republicans want Obama to do things that in a saner world, the Republicans want to be and would be able to do. This is a critical issue that we saw very clearly last week when John Boehner called for Obama to address the border crisis through executive action at the very same time that Boehner was also suing Obama for dealing with a problem with Obamacare with executive action.

This gets to the great (And poetic!) Mario Cuomo quote, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” The big problem, at least since Obama became President, is that Republican politicians are no longer willing to abide by this. So in the House right now, the majority of the Republican majority are not willing to take 98% of what they want. That missing 2% would destroy the meter of the verse. And, of course, missing 50% would be totally unacceptable—the poetry would be unrecognizable.

But I think the Republican Party establishment really has to take responsibility for this. The truth is that it has nothing to worry about. The party is now well to the right of its base when it comes to actual policy. But the party establishment has allowed itself to be radicalized by the likes of the subgeniuses Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. Watching the House Republicans, all I see is weakness. It looks like a caucus that is so afraid, that it is unable to do anything. Their base is mad about the border situation, but they can’t do anything, because they’ve become certain they were sent to Washington to destroy the federal government. These are the same people who represent states who get far more from the federal government than they send to it.

So the question is, when is the Republican Party going to make a stand? As it is, the only difference between the “establishment” and the “tea party” candidates are how extreme their rhetoric is. There is no discernible difference in their policies. But the party insists upon treating their voters as though they were children. They continue to allow this idea to fester that through force of will alone, they can have 100% of what they want. But they know that the base doesn’t actually want what they claim, and that if the party actually did what they said they were going to, it would be a catastrophe.

And we are left with the situation that Ezra Klein wrote about where the hated Obama has far more power than if the Republicans would just start acting like a normal political party.

Update (5 August 2014 11:33 pm)

I just noticed that Bernstein had exactly the same reaction to Ezra Klein’s article that I did, Republican Heal Thyself. Of course, he does it in his own (non-ranting) professional style:

So, yes, what’s happening in Congress is absolutely bad for Congress, and bad for the US political system. But it’s not really about Congress, or even about partisan polarization; it’s yet another consequence of a broken Republican Party.

Republicans Don’t Want Better Schools

Posted on 05 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

Digby What is so great about Digby is that she can blow your mind with a sentence like, “The idea that the Republicans are worried about ‘bad teachers’ when they encourage the practice of kids being taught at home by parents who aren’t qualified to teach someone how to get up in the morning is a joke.” These are the kind of things that seem obvious but which I somehow missed. And this is an issue that I care rather a lot about.

My sister homeschools her son. She has various reasons for this. But she is also well educated and provides the kind of learning and social environment that all but the richest of parents would envy. So I have nothing against homeschooling in general. But we often get into conflict when talking about the issue, because I am critical of the homeschooling movement. I think most parents homeschool their children for the wrong reasons. What’s more, most parents have no business teaching their children and end up being dependent upon prepackaged curricula that are more about protecting children from the great big world of ideas than about educating them.

Consider the National Center for Education Statistics 2006 survey of the reasons that parents gave for homeschooling. Previous open-ended surveys created their own problems, so they offered parents six reasons to choose from as you can see in the following table:

Reasons for homeschooling	Applicable		Most important
Reasons for homeschooling	Number	Percent	Number	Percent
Concern about environment of other schools	935,000	85.4	341,000	31.2
Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools	748,000	68.2	180,000	16.5
To provide religious or moral instruction	793,000	72.3	327,000	29.8
Child has a physical or mental health problem	174,000	15.9	71,000	6.5
Child has other special needs	316,000	28.9	79,000	7.2
Other reasons	221,000	20.1	97,000	8.8

What’s interesting about this is that you can see both what was a factor and what was the primary issue. “Academics” is the smallest of the “big three” reasons. The top two are basically just “moral” concerns: “Environment” and “Religion.” This is responsible for 61% of parents’ primary reason for homeschooling. Now, I’m sure that some of the people in that group were not homeschooling for religious or anti-intellectual reasons. Just the same, I’m sure that some of those who chose the “Academics” reason actually meant, “I’m afraid my child will get a bad education that doesn’t teach them that God created the universe in six literal days.”

So how bad is it? Well, last year, David Wheeler made quite a splash with his short The Atlantic article, Old Earth, Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution. The subtitle is, “More Christian parents are asking for mainstream science in their children’s curricula. Will religious textbook companies deliver?” So the fact that some evangelicals actually want their children to learn real science was a big deal. I think that tells you how big the problem is.

So let’s get back to Digby’s insight. These are the parents that Republicans think are just great for teaching our children how to be good and productive citizens. When they push homeschooling, they aren’t thinking of my sister with her Biology degree from the University of California and all her liberal ideas. They are thinking of the people who are trying to keep their children from learning anything that Bronze Age Palestinians didn’t know. And we are supposed to believe that these Republicans are trying to improve public education by destroying teachers’ unions? No. They are trying to destroy teachers’ unions because they want to destroy teachers’ unions. And if they simultaneously destroy public education, that will be an extra benefit.

Improving My Parents Open Carry

Posted on 05 Aug 2014 by Frank Moraes

This is a detail from the new children’s book, My Parents Open Carry. You may well have heard about it because it is making quite the splash. It tells the story of 13-year-old Brenna Strong and her open carry parents as they go about their day with loaded guns strapped to them. Everyone knows the true sign of civilization is being armed because you can’t trust anyone! The book fills a gaping hole in children’s literature. I have never, for example, seen a book about a child whose parents were so paranoid and politically belligerent that they needed to walk around with loaded guns on display. So I think it is excellent that this book is out. Now we need to have a book about the parents of serial killers. There are just so many holes in children’s literature. Stupid Obama administration!

I haven’t read the whole book—only as much as I was allowed to on Amazon. And that means just the first page. But based upon that, it is a dull affair. We learn that young Brenna is “dreaming dreams only a 13 year old girl would dream.” How evocative! With that little description, we know exactly who Brenna is: a stock 13-year-old girl from, How to Write a Children’s Book Children Will Hate. But that’s fine, because it’s pretty clear this book is not written for children. It is a political exercise—intended to get publicity for the open carry movement.

Need more evidence? The book opens with this sentence, “The Strong family consists of Richard Strong, his wife Bea and their 13 year old daughter, Brenna.” Note the traditional hierarchy. We know who’s in charge and we know the last name of “wife Bea.” But more than this, what children’s fiction writer decides to start a book ostensibly about Brenna by describing the family structure? After getting the hierarchy straight, the writers tell us where the family lives: modest home; medium sized town; Midwest. This is a far more un-threatening milieu than John Fitzgerald’s 1967 classic The Great Brain, set in 1890s Utah.

After we learn about generic Brenna dreaming her generic dream in her generic house in her generic hometown, her equally generic mother (Of course!) comes in and wakes her generically with, “Brenna, come on sweetheart, we have lots to do today. We have errands to run, people to see, and places to go!” Note the awkward use of the rule of three: “places to go” is implied in the others. It’s boring writing from beginning to end.

Let’s see if I can improve upon it:

Brenna was dreaming. It was one she’d had many times before about bunnies—baby bunnies. She loved baby bunnies, especially the white ones because they reminded her of her family. As she sat on a grassy knoll watching them frolic, her parents stood above her with their guns, shooting the baby bunnies one by one. Mom was going to make rabbit stew, which would last them all week. Pa had promised to save her one of the rabbit’s feet as a good luck charm.

Bam!

Brenna shot up in bed. Her mother had shot a bullet into her daughter’s headboard. This was usually how her mother woke her on weekends. “Brenna, come on sweetheart,” her mother said. “We have lots to do today. We have errands to run, people to see, and places to go!” Brenna sighed to herself. No good luck charm after all.

Okay, so it’s not even good. But sadly, it is infinitely better than the three paragraph long insipid snor-fest that Brian Jeffs and Nathan Nephew provided us. Apparently their only qualification for writing this book is that they are the co-founders of Michigan Open Carry. But maybe that’s as it should be, because again, the purpose of the book is political and not, as the authors claimed, to create “an open carry adventure.” But that usage is interesting. Apparently, in the open carry community, an “adventure” is just getting through one day without accidentally shooting anyone.

One thing I’m especially interested in is that cover. The illustrator, Lorna Bergman, is competent, I suppose. But she is certainly not very interesting or inspired. It does, however, have the advantage of matching the prose. Be that as it may, what I’m struck with are the characters. Mother and daughter have blond hair and blue eyes. Father has light brown hair and blue eyes. It strikes me as awfully Aryan. And note: as far as I can tell, both of the writers have brown eyes. But the characters are also skinny and the writers are, well, a bit on the chunky side.

The whole thing is quite successful in one way: conservatives are whipping out their wallets and buying this book big time. But there’s nothing especially new about that. Conservatives have been supporting mediocre writers for decades. Now they’ve switched to supporting non-writers. And this book really will support the “open carry” cause, because all of that money is going to be funneled to Michigan Open Carry.

I am so jealous! I wish that I were a conservative so I could make a lot of money without the obligation of having to demonstrate any talent or hard work.

Frankly Curious

Everything interesting for everyone interesting…

Officer Richard Recine Shouldn’t Have Been Fired

Rick Perlstein on the Tea Party

Left vs Right Wing Reactions

What Is the Tea Party?

Reform Republicans Only Sound Reasonable—It’s in the Job Description

The Modern Justice of Elizabeth Bathory

Wall St Says Economic Inequality Is Bad

Vote ID Is Not About Voter Fraud

Congressional Polls Show Bad Economy

George Jung Is Free

Republican Delusion Empowers Obama

Update (5 August 2014 11:33 pm)

Republicans Don’t Want Better Schools

Improving My Parents Open Carry