This Week in Love
June 26, 2015. Love is love. Family is family.
This Week in Race
The murders of nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week have rekindled the conversation about race in America. That conversation which has been growing ever since George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin. It died down for a while, but this year reignited it, following a series of young black men being killed--often by cops--for stupid reasons or none at all. Black Lives Matter became the rallying cry of this movement, of this moment in the fraught history of race in America.
We might want to adapt that to All Lives Matter, because that's a true statement. They do. And we live in a country where there's a lot of unnecessary dying. Around 30,000 lives are lost each year to gun violence, another 30,000 to automobiles, maybe twice that to heart disease, more to cancer, and a whopping 70,000+ to alcohol-related causes (which also plays an major role in those gun deaths and car deaths), and so on*. Some of these factors we could do something about, if we cared enough to put effort and money into research, if we were willing to pass laws that reflect the value of human lives.
But Black Lives Matter is a specific statement about a specific issue. Not being all-inclusive doesn't make it any less true, or less necessary to say. It addresses a separate situation--the fact that, almost since our founding, we have placed less value on black lives than on white ones. Our original sin of slavery taught us that black lives were worth whatever they could fetch on the open market, and no more. After emancipation came Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Great Migration, and whether blacks were in the South being terrorized by lynchings and night riders, or in the North being underpaid and redlined into segregated urban pockets, they were still seen as something other, as if skin color was the sole--or at least the most important--factor in determining who people are and how they should be treated.
It's true that we don't tend to investigate or prosecute black-on-black crimes (or white-on-black crimes) with the same zeal that we do black-on-white crimes. It's true that the justice system is rigged against the poor--an economic class that disproportionately includes blacks, because their employment prospects are limited by geography, by transportation, by quality of education, and by employer bias. It's true that de facto housing and school segregation is still commonplace. It's true that polluted air is more common in minority neighborhoods. It's true that there's an ongoing effort to limit voting participation by blacks. And it's true that young black men are more likely to be shot by police than any other group. Systemic racism is still a problem.
All Lives Matter, but Black Lives Matter, too, and those two statements aren't mutually exclusive.
* The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has an awesome website where you can put in the type of death or injury you're interested in, and it will give you statistics on that subject. Play with it here.
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Last week, we wrote this about Hillary Clinton: "... she's much more of a policy wonk than an orator who can deliver sweeping, inspirational speeches, like President Obama."
This week, she schooled us by delivering a speech that included this passage:
“Now, it’s tempting, it is tempting to dismiss a tragedy like this as an isolated incident, to believe that in today’s America, bigotry is largely behind us, that institutionalized racism no longer exists. But despite our best efforts and our highest hopes, America’s long struggle with race is far from finished.
“I know this is a difficult topic to talk about. I know that so many of us hoped by electing our first black president, we had turned the page on this chapter in our history. I know there are truths we don’t like to say out loud or discuss with our children. But we have to. That’s the only way we can possibly move forward together.
“Race remains a deep fault line in America. Millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives…. More than a half century after Dr. King marched and Rosa Parks sat and John Lewis bled, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and so much else, how can any of these things be true? But they are.
“And our problem is not all kooks and Klansman. It’s also in the cruel joke that goes unchallenged. It’s in the off-hand comments about not wanting ‘those people’ in the neighborhood.
“Let’s be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear. And news reports about poverty and crime and discrimination evoke sympathy, even empathy, but too rarely do they spur us to action or prompt us to question our own assumptions and privilege.
“We can’t hide from any of these hard truths about race and justice in America. We have to name them and own them and then change them.”
That's some serious speechifying. Her delivery isn't soaring, but the writing is good.
* * *
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about race this week, too, and described some of the ways in which the former Confederate states still stand out from the rest. He writes:
". . . the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.
"And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South."
And follows that with this:
"For those who haven’t been following this issue, in 2012 the Supreme Court gave individual states the option, if they so chose, of blocking the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, a key part of the plan to provide health insurance to lower-income Americans. But why would any state choose to exercise that option? After all, states were being offered a federally-funded program that would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn down such an offer?
"The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding: Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid, and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80 percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that practiced slavery before the Civil War.
"And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy."
* * *
To her credit, this week SC Gov. Nikki Haley (R) called for the Confederate Battle Flag to be taken down from the state capitol grounds. It's up to the legislature, but she said she would force the legislature back into session if they don't deal with it right away. She defended the flag a little too vehemently for our tastes, but the action is more important than the words. That flag is a celebration of brutal tyranny, of literal treason, and it should not fly in any official capacity anywhere. Until the church shootings, she had defended the flag's place at the capitol, so this is an abrupt about-face. One hopes it's genuine enlightenment, and not just a desire to take the flag issue off the table so Republican presidential hopefuls won't have to thread any more needles on that topic. Anybody think she's running for VP?
And to his credit, presidential candidate and far-right goofball Dr. Ben Carson doesn't have any patience for his fellow candidates who refuse to admit that what motivated the killer was racism, not insanity or anti-Christian bias. "Not everything is about race in this country. But when it is about race, then it just is," Carson writes. "So when a guy who has been depicted wearing a jacket featuring an apartheid-era Rhodesian flag walks into a historic black church and guns down nine African-American worshipers at a Bible study meeting, common sense leads one to believe his motivations are based in racism."
* * *
In what was almost certainly not intended as irony, a Fox "News" panel this week discussed whether the fuss over the flag was a "slippery slope" toward sterilizing the history of the Civil War. One of the hosts said, "“When you talk about wiping away history, how ignorant do you want us to become? Do you want us not to have any memory at all?”
The problem with that, of course, is that the people who object to the fetishization of the Confederacy are the ones who have the history right. They're not suggesting that the history be whitewashed (as it were), but that it be remembered correctly. The Confederacy's "heroes" were fighting on behalf of slavery, and the South's postwar period was rank with hatred and white supremacy--a cause that for many Americans still exists today. To honor those "heroes' is to celebrate men who turned against their own country, soldiers in an illegal, unconstitutional attempt at rebellion against the United States of America. Fox hosts who refuse to understand that are the ones spreading ignorance. And we don't understand how anyone who truly loves America can also root for those who tried to rip it in two. To fly the American flag next to a Confederate one is a hopeless contradiction.
* * *
The people who manufacture Confederate flags and other articles using that design are no doubt having a very good bad week this week. Good because folks in certain parts of the country are falling over themselves trying to buy as many such items they can before their favorite stores stop selling them. Walmart, Sears/Kmart, Target, and Amazon are all pulling Confederate flag merchandise from real and virtual shelves. So are eBay and etsy, and the Valley Forge Flag Co.--if you have an American flag at your house, it was likely made by Valley Forge, unless it was made in China--will no longer manufacture them. Bad because the profits from this spasm of pro-slavery, pro-treason sympathy will be obliterated when the remaining quantities of those products are all returned to the manufacturers by said retailers.
It's a sad statement that it took the murders of nine good people to make these companies understand that selling a symbol that, for at least 10% of our population, is a vivid reminder that their ancestors likely came here in chains and lived here as property, is probably in bad taste at best. No doubt some conservatives will claim that this is an example of political correctness run amuck, having forgotten that they're supposed to believe in the invisible hand of the free market to make such corrections, and that's really what's happening here. Those businesses weren't ordered to do that, they made a commercial decision to do so. If people want to complain about states making moves to dump Confederate symbolism, that's a better argument. But we still believe it has more to do with having suddenly become aware of the fact that for so many of us, that flag stands for hate, not heritage. Others of us understood that by the third grade, and could never understand why the states were so slow to catch up.
Side Note: In what is probably a step too far, in the minds of Dukes of Hazzard fans, Warner Bros announced that they would no longer license the image of the "General Lee."
* * *
Here's an important history lesson that describes how all that Confederate symbology ended up all over the South. It hasn't been prominent since the Civil War--it's mostly been so from the late 1950s/early 1960s, as a white segregationist response to the Civil Rights movement. The flag we typically see, the Confederate Battle Flag, was for decades a symbol of the losing side in a failed rebellion against the United States, and a rallying point only for white supremacist groups like the KKK. Its comeback was the racist response to the prospect of black Americans getting the right to vote, the right to fair housing, the right to go to "white" schools and eat at "white" lunch counters, and so on. If it symbolizes the Confederacy at all, it also symbolizes this more recent interpretation, and either way it's about white people thinking that black people are less than human.
* * *
And here's another historian's take on how the South won the battle over how the Civil War would be perceived. The South has been mythologized, glamorized, Gone With the Wind-ized, to the point that more Americans believe the war to have been about states' rights than about slavery. As Tony Horwitz writes here, those who wrote down their reasons for breaking from the union "left no doubt about the state right at issue." The war was about protecting their slave-based economy, and the rest is window dressing.
Below the fold: Guns, terror, straw men, bears, and more!
This Week in Gun Safety
One might be forgiven for thinking that a sane society would use an event like the Charleston shootings as an opportunity to seriously consider the reason why such horrors keep happening--and why they happen in the US far more often than in any other developed country.
But on the issue of guns--which are the answer to the "why" question above--our society is anything but sane. President Obama's take was, "At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it." A board member (or former board member; we've seen conflicting accounts) of the NRA's response was to say that if only those people had been packing heat at their Bible study meeting, one or more of them could have put down the gunman before he killed so many people.
Which, of course, is idiotic, since if a troubled young man hadn't been able to buy a gun and ammunition in the first place, then the folks at Emanuel AME wouldn't have had to lock and load before Bible study. The pro-gun death lobby has their chicken and their egg a little backward.
In the New Yorker, writer Adam Gopnik echoes an argument we've made here. As with climate change and Keynesian economics, the science is settled, the facts are known, and it's ideology, not facts, keeping the sides polarized. We know that more guns equals more gun violence. We know that guns are rarely actually used in self-defense, that having guns in a household greatly increases the chances that someone in that household will die from gun violence, and that if the nation weren't awash with guns, those people who think they need guns for self-defense would have much less to worry about.
Gopnik writes:
"The reason that we have gun massacres in numbers wildly out of proportion to any other rich country is because we have too many guns. When gun massacres have happened elsewhere—as they sometimes have, in Canada and Scotland and Australia and elsewhere—the common-sense response has been to change the laws, and, almost always, after the laws are changed the massacres end. In the United States, they continue. It seems like a good bet that changing the law here would change that.
"In the areas of gun crime where there has been extended study, we know for certain that serious gun control works to end, or at least limit, gun violence. It is as robust a correlation as any in the social sciences, as sure a thing, as I’ve written before, as knowing that antibiotics act to limit and end infections. You go looking for sane counterarguments in favor of overarmed America and find that none exist. Guns don’t protect anyone from anything. Their presence simply increases the odds of domestic tragedy, of a domestic altercation turning into a homicide (or a suicide)."
Gopnik adds: "Nor is there what a morally alert person could describe as a natural “right” or a liberty to own lethal weapons designed only for murder—every remotely free society, other than our own, is astounded by the notion that it might be. There is no “balancing act” between rights and responsibilities here. No “right” is violated when we keep people from having lethal weapons designed only to kill other people; no countervailing responsibility need be invoked."
His conclusion? "On most public issues, there are two reasonable views, even when one view seems, to put it mildly, cruel—the view, say, that poor people should be left without medical insurance. But on gun control there isn’t. All the facts are in; all the social science is long settled; the constitutional positions are clear, if contested, and the wiser way known and shared by mankind. On one side are facts, truth, and common sense. On the other, an obsession with dark fantasies of individual autonomy and power—the sheer fetishistic thrill of owning lethal weapons. On one side is the sanity and common sense shared by the entire world; on the other, murder and madness and a strange ongoing American mania. If we don’t change, then, well—it will happen again, again. And then again."
Indeed, the data tell us that mass shootings are becoming more common, and deadlier, even as violent crime as a whole continues on a downward trajectory. President Obama served--once again--as Eulogizer-in-Chief this week. He must be weary to the depths of his soul of addressing communities shredded by gun violence.
* * *
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D/NV) asked a reasonable question in a floor speech this week: "Is that asking too much? Couldn’t we at least do this little thing to stop people who are mentally ill, people who are criminals from purchasing guns? The people support it. It has bipartisan support. Americans overwhelmingly agree that those who are mentally ill or are felons should not be able to buy guns. We should act to save lives by expanding background checks."
The Charleston shooter purchased his gun legally, but if South Carolina didn't have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the nation, he might not have been able to do so, since he's currently facing drug charges.
* * *
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum walks through some of the incremental changes in gun laws that could make mass shootings less common, if only Congress would act. Meanwhile, The Economist's Democracy in America column discusses the reasons that Congress won't act, and no restrictions on gun ownership will result from the slaughter in Charleston, concluding with this:
"Gallup pollsters have asked Americans the same question for some years, namely whether having a gun in the house makes it a safer or more dangerous place to be. In 2000 Republicans were already more likely than Democrats to think that guns made a home safer, by a margin of 44% to 28%. Just before Mr Obama’s election in 2008 Democrats had become more gun-friendly, with 41% thinking them a source of safety, compared to 53% of Republicans. Then the gap between the two parties exploded. By 2014 Democrats were still at 41%, but 81% of Republicans now said that a gun made their homes safer.
"Pew Research Centre polling shows that whites are almost twice as likely as blacks and Hispanics to say it is more important to protect gun rights than to control access to guns. Those living in rural areas and Americans living in the South and Midwest are far keener on guns than those in the north-east. Post-graduates are much keener on gun control than those with high school educations alone. Gun ownership follows similar trends.
"In short, questions over guns are becoming questions of identity. When Mr Obama or the mayor of Charleston says that gun control would be a logical response to Wednesday’s killings, the message triggers a tribal response. The America that believes that guns make the country more dangerous—urban, educated, Democratic America—is proposing to disarm the America that is sure (indeed increasingly sure) that safety lies in keeping firearms close by. As a result, nobody is about to disarm anyone."
* * *
Why are they afraid of data? Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee voted--once again--to block the CDC from studying gun violence as a public health issue. They're afraid, according to reports, that the CDC's findings would amount to advocacy in favor of gun control. Which raises the natural question--if gun violence is indeed a public health issue, and the CDC came up with science suggesting that some restrictions on gun ownership would keep Americans from being killed, wouldn't that be good information to have? As it is, the data prove one thing--Republicans in Congress (and some Democrats) are intentionally choosing to have more dead Americans instead of more common-sense gun laws.
This Week in Terrorism
Americans have been conditioned to expect terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists at almost any time. But in reality, our mental image of a terrorist should look a lot more like Timothy McVeigh than Osama bin Laden. According to the New York Times:
"Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
"The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.
"Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period."
Death by terrorism is still only a very remote possibility. But when any American does die from a terrorist attack, it's much more likely to come from a right-wing extremist than a Muslim extremist.
This Week in 2016
The 13th Republican* to officially announce his (or her--lonely over there, Ms. Fiorina?) candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination is Louisiana Gov. Bobby (Brady) Jindal. Jindal is currently the least popular governor in the country, with voters in his overwhelmingly conservative state preferring even President Obama to their own governor. He also comes in near the bottom of the national polls. Unless he climbs fast and far, he won't even be on stage for the first Republican debate in August.
Jindal is no dope, but he plays one on TV. Although he's extremely conservative, he sometimes finds himself demonstrating that government can work (compare his administration's response to Hurricane Gustav in 2008 to Democrat Kathleen Blanco's response to Katrina three years earlier). But his state's finances are a mess, thanks to his predilection for tax-cutting. And he's not beyond falling victim to right-wing nonsense, as when he publicly denounced non-existent Islamic "no-go zones." He's a decent politician and a terrible speaker, and he's the first Indian-American (Asian Indian, not Native American) presidential candidate in the nation's history.
And he doesn't have a chance.
* There are plenty of people who've paid their way into the race, but who aren't considered "real" candidates--they're normally fringe types who want publicity, or to make a point, or are sometimes just kooks. Some of those are Republican, but we're not counting those. Neither does anybody else.
This Week in Health Care
By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a drafting error in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) didn't change the meaning of the law, thereby protecting the health insurance of about 6.4 million people. The three most conservative justices, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, were hoping to use four words among the 900 pages of the ACA to blow up the entire law, but they lost out and America won an important victory. The decision is here. We can't help but wonder how many of our tax dollars were spent on a case that should have been laughed out of the very first court it went to. There was never a Constitutional question here, never a genuinely damaged party, and the Court's taking it up was outside the normal chain of events for such things.
* * *
Former Arkansas governor and perpetual presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called the ruling an "out-of-control act of judicial tyranny." Huckabee might be ever-so-slightly inclined toward hysterical hyperbole.
It's easy for Huckabee to complain, because he's no longer a governor. The people who would have been most affected by a different SCOTUS decision would have been people in red states that haven't set up exchanges. Some of the candidates are governors of those states, and they would have been seriously damaged had the ruling gone the other way--torn between their electoral interests and pressure from within their states to get exchanges running as fast as possible. Now they don't have to face that conflict--they can fuss about the ruling without having to actually do anything.
* * *
We confess to being entertained by the fact that Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the decision, used a line from Justice Scalia's dissent in the 2012 ACA case to support the majority here. In 2012, Scalia wrote, "Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all."
That one line shows that Scalia understood Congress's intent all along. He had to completely reverse his interpretation to find issue with it this time. His dissent was based purely on ideology, not on the merits of the case or on any Constitutional principle. He complained in his dissent that the Court had to try to rule on the context of the entire law, rather than taking those four words at face value. But back in January, Scalia said, "When we look at a provision of law, we look at the entire provision of law, including later amendments. We try to make sense of the law as a whole.” Again, the exact opposite of what he's saying now. He twists himself into a Moebius loop to justify opinions that contradict his own earlier opinions, and astonishingly, seems to feel no shame about it.
Which is not at all surprising, given that he usually operates that way. His purpose on the Court is not to uphold the Constitution, but to twist it whenever necessary to advance his far-right agenda. An honest justice with his bent would have retired years ago, certain that impartial rulings were beyond his capabilities. Scalia can turn a nice phrase, and we admire that. But he does so in the service of obfuscating the truth, and we can only detest that.
This Week in Straw Men
One of the easiest--and cheapest--stunts in political debate is to set up a "straw man" just to knock him down, hoping all the while that your audience doesn't catch on. Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY) does a lot of this--his whole faux-libuster on drones was him tilting against a straw man, because there never was a danger that US officials would decide that the existence of drones meant the existing laws on use of force would be thrown out the window.
The latest example is not quite as melodramatic, because he didn't have to stand up in the Senate chamber to say it, but it is no less dishonest. Here's his argument:
“Over 40 years, we now define pollutants as dirt and your back yard as a navigable stream. It wouldn’t be funny if we weren’t putting people in jail for it. Guy named Robert Lucas, down at the southern part of Mississippi, 10 years ago was 70 years old. He was put in prison for 10 years. He just got out. Ten years without parole. Ten years without early release. He was convicted of a RICO conspiracy. RICO’s something you’re supposed to be going after gangsters for. You know what his conspiracy was? Conspiracy to put dirt on his own land. We’ve gone crazy. We’ve run amok.”
Doesn't that sound terrible? Stupid big government. A guy can put some dirt on his own property.
Except this is Paul tilting at a straw man, because the truth is much more complex. It involves the aforementioned Lucas developing his 2600-acre property in violation of various cease-and-desist orders, because some of it was federally protected wetlands. He didn't bother getting the necessary permits for some of the work. He carved it up into 67 lots for mobile homes. Then, as the Washington Post reports:
"Big Hill Acres then was advertised and sold mostly to low- or fixed-income families. Lucas represented to potential buyers that the lots were 'habitable and suitable for home sites when in fact they were not,' the indictment said. Some residents later testified that they were not told that their homes were on wetlands.
"The area was prone to seasonal flooding. So homes flooded during major rainfalls, while raw sewage seeped up from the ground, and flowed through the subdivision.
"Federal prosecutors accused Lucas, his daughter (who sold real estate) and the engineer of 41 counts of conspiracy to defraud, environmental violations and mail fraud (over the delivery of payments for the properties by mail). Prosecutors said Lucas, his daughter and the engineer knowingly sold properties with illegal and malfunctioning septic systems, and built and filled federally protected wetlands despite numerous warnings."
The three were convicted by a jury of their peers. Then Lucas made things worse by selling off some of the property, in violation of his bond.
Yes, he was sent to prison, but not for a RICO conspiracy--there were never any racketeering charges, never any mention of RICO. His sentence was 9 years, not 10, and he did get early release. Did Paul get any of his facts right? Well, he knew the guy's name, and that he was an older man. The "dirt" Lucas put on his property was topsoil brought in to cover up the inadequate sewage system.
If you're willing to be blatantly dishonest--if, in other words, you think your audience comprises chumps and marks who don't know any better--it's easy to set up a straw man and knock him down.
We were hoping that Mitt Romney's disgraceful performance in 2012 would be a record low point in the history of dishonest American presidential campaigns, but we're starting to worry that this cycle's batch of candidates might sink lower still.
* * *
Speaking of known plagiarists, it turns out that lifting other people's words without attribution is not Rand Paul's only problem when it comes to "writing" his books. He also suffers from the reverse: he attributes words and sentences to people--particularly the Founding Fathers--who never said those things. Paul tries to buttress nonsensical arguments with quotations from folks like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, James Madison, and George Washington, but those people either didn't say what Paul claims they did, or he's completely altered the context so it sounds like they meany the opposite of what they really did mean.
Once again, we have to wonder what people are talking about when they say Rand Paul is true to his principles, because we have yet to see evidence that he is principled in the slightest.
This Week in Foreign Policy
How we spend money on foreign aid is just as important to our long-term security as how we spend money on defense. But we don't spend nearly as much--not even remotely--and we don't pay nearly enough attention to what we're doing with it. Here's an enlightening interview with Sen. Chris Murphy (D/CT) about foreign policy, and an important piece from Foreign Policy about how to make what we do spend on foreign aid more efficient and more effective.
This Week in Laziness
The Washington Post has done a study of which states have the laziest residents, as determined by various metrics, including time spent watching TV, eating fast food, enjoying soap operas, and (the lack of) exercise. The top 10 laziest states are deep red, with the occasional exception of swing state Ohio. The non-laziest states include such liberal bastions as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Oregon, as well as hard-working western states like Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.
This Week in Bears
Bruiser the brown bear goes for a swim.
How do you scare away a bear at your door? Here's one way.
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