This Week in America

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 31)

TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.

 

This Week in Health Care

This year marks the half-century anniversary of Medicare, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 30, 1965. Medicare is, of course, hugely popular, and has been very successful at doing what it was meant to do. As the Huffington Post reports, "But if some seniors still struggle with medical bills, the situation is far better than it was five decades ago, when half of the elderly population had no insurance at all. Studies have shown that Medicare has meant substantially smaller out-of-pocket spending for seniors and maybe (though not certainly) longer lives. The financial protection that the program provides to beneficiaries helps explain why just one in 10 seniors now lives in poverty. That’s roughly a third of what it was in the mid-1960s."

The same law birthed Medicaid, recently expanded to provide health insurance to millions of Americans who couldn't otherwise afford it. Is it socialized medicine? In the same sense that the VA system is, yes. Does it work? Yes. Do we care about the elderly and the poor in this country? We hope so.

Republicans have been trying to get rid of Medicare since before it became law, and they haven't stopped yet. They couch their plans in all kinds of language, but the net result is always the same. They're ideologically opposed to government "interference" in the free market, even when the private insurance market--for people without employer-provided health insurance, is a chaotic nightmare to navigate, and the prices for even basic plans are out of reach for the working poor and the non-working elderly.

So happy birthday, Medicare (and Medicaid)! We here at TWiA are glad you're out there.

This Week in Gun Safety

The most recent mass shooting in the country (as of this writing) was in a movie theater in Lafayette, LA. Two women were killed, nine wounded, and the shooter killed himself. 

Louisiana governor (and presidential candidate) Bobby Jindal (R) declared that it wasn't the right time to talk about gun laws, saying, "There will be an absolute appropriate time for us to talk about policies and politics." Just not now.

He was, however, happy to blame other states for not providing mental health information to the federal background check database. He's right about that--it should be standard across the nation, and it's not. But he's wrong to focus on that as the only solution.

There is an undeniable connection between mental health issues and mass shootings. Mass shootings, though, make up a tiny minority of gun deaths. Far more common are suicides, accidental shootings, shootings within the home, and criminal violence. Mental health issues rarely play a part in those. The one thing those have in common with all mass shootings is guns. (And research has shown that for gun violence in general, alcohol use is a much better predictor than mental health. After guns, alcohol is what most shootings have in common.)

And Louisiana has some of the most lax gun laws in the country. Not coincidentally, Louisiana has the highest per capita number of gun deaths and gun homicides. According to The Trace: "More than half of Louisiana’s 8,552 gun deaths over that period were homicides. Its gun homicide rate is more than 2.5 times the national average and approximately 25 percent higher than that of the state with the second-highest rate, Mississippi."

No wonder Jindal doesn't want to talk about it. When your state's economy is in the toilet and your citizens are killing each other all the time, "Let me do for the country what I've done for my state" isn't the easiest sell for a presidential candidate. It's unlikely that Jindal will be in the race long enough for it to be much of a problem, and that's part of the reason why.

What Jindal and other conservatives refuse to recognize is the simple truth: where there are more guns, there's more gun violence. To reduce gun violence, reduce the number of guns. 

 * * *

Although the common argument in favor of guns is that people need them for self defense, the truth is that they're rarely used that way. FBI data show that in 2012, for every "justifiable" gun homicide, there were 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and 2 accidental gun deaths.

And people who aren't trained in self-defense are really bad at it.

* * *

Richmond, CA had a serious problem with gun violence, so the city tried a novel approach. They identified the 50 people most likely to shoot someone, approached them, and offered them "a spot on a program that includes a stipend to turn their lives around." And it worked. Gun violence dropped significantly. 94% of the people in the program are still alive, and 79% "have not been arrested or charged with gun-related offenses."

* * *

Mass shootings, we said, are rare, but they're becoming less so.  If you define a mass shooting as four or more people injured by gunfire in a single event, we've had an average of one per day in 2015. Here's a comprehensive set of resources for individuals, organizations, schools, churches, etc., on active shooter incidents. And here's the FBI's study of active shooter incidents from 2000-2013. Of note to the pro-gun death crowd who thinks more people should go around armed because of active shooters: Of the 160 incidents covered, one was ended by the involvement of an armed civilian. Every other one that was ended by someone pulling a gun on the shooter involved law enforcement professionals or professional security guards.

We say all the time that untrained, gun-carrying civilians just don't stop active shooters, and statistically that's true, even if there is a single incident once every couple of decades. They're more likely to either not factor in at all, or to make matters worse. At the shooting that wounded friend of TWiA Rep. Gabby Giffords, a civilian with a gun heard the gunfire and came out with his own gun. When he reached the scene, people were struggling for the shooter's gun, and the civilian identified the wrong person as the gunman. Fortunately, he holstered his weapon without using it, or he'd have shot yet another innocent person and perhaps allowed the real shooter to escape or to continue his massacre.

The NRA likes to throw around statistics showing that people often use guns to defend themselves against violence. Those statistics mostly come from this guy, who's a notoriously dishonest "researcher" who even other pro-gun researchers admit is a phony. Among real gun researchers, only 9% claim that more guns = less crime.

Below the fold: campaign craziness, cutting taxes, busy doin' nothin', scandal, and bears.

 

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 30)

 

This Week in Lafayette

Thursday night, America saw another mass shooting, this time at a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. He killed three people, including himself, so far--one is still in critical condition as we write this--and wounded nine. The gunman was a 59-year-old drifter, far outside the norm for this sort of thing. What he has in common with the Aurora theater shooter, the Chattanooga military recruiting station shooter, and all the rest is that last word: shooter. He had a gun, and he used it to kill his fellow Americans.

We're left with repeating our question from last week:

More guns don't make Americans safe. More guns makes more dead Americans.

How many lives are too many?

This Week in Chattanooga

Last week we mentioned the mass shooting in Chattanooga. We're sorry to report that since then, one more victim has died, bringing the total to four Marines and one sailor.

There are, of course, lessons to be learned from any such tragedy. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem intent on making sure the lessons learned this time are the wrong ones. Some members of Congress--and others--think the proper response is to make sure all members of the military are armed at all times. Somehow, these people seem to believe the military just hasn't thought of that, and if they all carried guns everywhere, they'd all be fine.

Umm, false.

The military has thought about that, a lot. And they have decided--based on history and data and common sense--that it would be a bad idea. This excellent Trace article outlines some of the reasons why.

"Most service members — 99 percent of airmen, 88 percent of sailors, and about two-thirds of soldiers and Marines — are not in direct combat roles, but instead are technical workers whose specialties support those “tip of the spear” troops. These include navigators, supply clerks, water purification specialists, and camera crews. Roughly the same breakdown applies to the backgrounds of recruiters and reservists. Practically speaking, this means that your average military member’s firearms experience may only go as far as some boot camp familiarization with a service rifle on a “static range,” plinking at paper targets to qualify for a marksmanship ribbon."

 ...

"The upshot is that your average service member is more qualified than most civilians to handle guns, but no more qualified to neutralize an active shooter than the average professional mechanic is to race the Daytona 500.

" And they don’t need to be, because most military sites have dedicated base Department of Defense police and military members like MPs and masters-at-arms who specialize in armed law enforcement."

...

"Hardly any military office meets the definition of a 'gun-free zone,' but every military office does observe strict discipline on gun use. 'Arming DoD personnel with firearms shall be limited and controlled,' the policy states, limiting armaments to 'qualified personnel' — those who apply and qualify to carry weapons, then undergo special training — 'when required for assigned duties and there is reasonable expectation that DoD installations, property, or personnel lives or DoD assets will be jeopardized if personnel are not armed.'"

...

"Even among highly experienced combat Marines, injury-causing firearms mishaps occur all the time. The day after the Chattanooga attack, a Navy recruiter shot himself in the leg with his own pistol in a Georgia recruiting center. The AP reported that the sailor accidentally shot himself while holstering the .45 and 'discussing the Tennessee shootings with one of his recruits.'

"And though Odierno was careful to spotlight accidents over deliberate violence, he is personally familiar with all-too-common fatal shootings committed by soldiers. He was running the Iraq war effort from a Baghdad base in spring 2009 when an Army sergeant on the same installation used an M-16 to kill five other soldiers. The sergeant had been under psychological evaluation but managed to disarm the guard watching him and use that weapon in the murders — on a complex where thousands of 'green-suiters' were required to carry their firearms at all times."

The thing those advocating for arming every soldier can't seem to grasp is that attacks like last week's are incredibly rare. And as The Trace points out, "Dating back to 1994, there had been 20 shootings on or around military installations before the Chattanooga tragedy. All of them were committed by disgruntled uniformed or civilian military workers."

Two service members in Chattanooga were, in fact, armed, and fired at the attacker. It's not yet clear whether either of them were authorized to be armed, or whether either hit the shooter.

Another problem with arming military recruiters and asking them to defend themselves against civilians is the legality of the issue. Many of the far-right militia groups cite the Posse Comitatus Act when arguing that federal military personnel do not have law enforcement capability within the US, except in specific, identified instances. The whole fuss over Jade Helm 15 is about that, after all--gullible people in some states fearing that the military is being used to enforce administration orders.  Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY) held an entire faux-libuster about the ridiculous question of whether drones could be used to shoot American citizens on American soil, and now he's introducing a bill in the Senate declaring that military recruiters should be armed. Why? Presumably so they can shoot American citizens on American soil. We've learned not to expect a deep commitment to principle--or even momentary consistency--from Sen. Paul, but flipping completely around on the very issue that first brought him to national prominence is a bit much.

Having more guns around leads to more gun injuries and gun deaths. That statistic holds true whether you're talking about trained military personnel, police officers, or anyone else. The folks in the Pentagon know that. They arm the appropriate people at military facilities--as in the rest of the country, armed, trained law enforcement officers are the ones most likely to be able to put an end to an active shooter incident, as the police did in Chattanooga. Require that more service members carry guns more often, and you're going to see more gun deaths in their ranks, not fewer.

* * *

Another lesson people should be taking away from that incident is not to jump to conclusions about a shooter based on his name or his religion. We're written here many times about the commonalities between the vast majority of mass murderers, and we come at the topic with a considerable amount of research under our belts.

The most common features of such events are these: The shooter is a young man, usually in his early-to-mid 20s. There's a history of violence in his background (not necessarily violence committed by him; more commonly, it's against him, and most often in the home). He has had at least one encounter with the mental health community. And he has recently suffered some kind of breaking point that has made him question his own identity--a question he has not been able to resolve. Finally, he has access to guns.

The Chattanooga shooter meets most of those qualifications. We've heard that he's suffered from severe depression and possibly bipolar disorder. As a teenager, he was diagnosed with a mental illness. He spent time in Jordan recently in an attempt to get away from drugs and alcohol--a rehab treatment that didn't seem to work. A recent DUI arrest confirms that. His father was physically abusive, frequently beating and sexually abusing his mother. He's been exploring radical jihadism, after a long history of being considered a "nice kid," polite and friendly, indicating a quest for identity. He's in his early 20s, and he was able to legally acquire powerful firearms.

We're not saying he might not have been in part inspired by jihadism. That seems evident mostly in the timing--at the end of Ramadan--and in his target, since ISIS encourages attacking military facilities. That said, the rest of it sounds like a "mainstream" mass murderer, not a terrorist. There doesn't seem to have been any attempt to make these killings send a message. These, like most mass murders, were more about lashing out. It's dangerous to look at the Islamic piece of it without looking at the rest. It isn't all Muslims we have to fear, but when a radicalized Muslim meets all the other criteria (or when anybody else does), somebody ought to take a closer look.

Side Note: Armed civilians--including some who are members of anti-government fringe groups--have started showing up at some military sites to "protect" the troops. Considering these same organizations are among those who stood alongside deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy and aimed loaded weapons at federal law enforcement officials, the military is decidedly not in favor of such a presence. The Navy has taken to telling recruiters that if armed civilians come to their sites, they should close up shop and perform their duties elsewhere. The Marine Corps has officially asked these people to stop coming to their sites with weapons, to no avail.

Far more American deaths since 2001 have come at the hands of domestic terrorists than Muslim ones, so military personnel would certainly be forgiven for considering the presence of these armed extremists more than a little unnerving.

Late Update: An armed civilian "guarding" a military recruiting center in Lancaster, OH, accidentally fired his AR-15 rifle into the pavement outside. People did not feel safer for having him on site.

Below the fold: Gun safety, 2016, crazy, and of course bears.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 29)

This Week in Gun Safety

On Thursday, the Aurora, CO movie theater shooter who killed 12 people and wounded 70 heard his verdict--not insane, and guilty on 165 counts of murder, attempted murder,  and other crimes..

On Thursday, the Mother Emanuel shooter who killed nine people in Charleston, SC appeared in court to hear the indictment against him.

On Thursday, a suspected terrorist killed four US Marines in Chattanooga, TN.

What do these heinous acts have in common? Not motive. Not place. Not technique. Not targets.

Guns.

Just guns.

More guns don't make Americans safe. More guns makes more dead Americans.

How many lives are too many?

 

This Week in Leaders and Legacies

Candidate Barack Obama told us in 2007 that he would hold discussions with nations not currently considered allies--Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran foremost among them. Engaging with them, he believed, was a necessary step toward coexistence. We couldn't wipe them off the planet--well, we could, but not without consequences worse than we wanted to deal with--so we had to find ways to live with them. And the old ways weren't working. We needed a new approach.

And he followed up. He opened relations with Cuba, ending a 50+-year embargo that had accomplished very little except impoverishing the citizens of one of our nearest neighbors. He's talking to Venezuela. He negotiated a climate deal with China. And now he has completed an agreement with Iran that puts the brakes on their nuclear weapons program.

It's not a perfect deal. No deal is. If one country holds all the cards and the other has none, then the former can impose its wishes on the latter, but that's not deal-making, it's colonialism. Peter Beinart writes:

"When critics focus incessantly on the gap between the present deal and a perfect one, what they’re really doing is blaming Obama for the fact that the United States is not omnipotent. This isn’t surprising given that American omnipotence is the guiding assumption behind contemporary Republican foreign policy. Ask any GOP presidential candidate except Rand Paul what they propose doing about any global hotspot and their answer is the same: be tougher. America must take a harder line against Iran’s nuclear program, against ISIS, against Bashar al-Assad, against Russian intervention in Ukraine and against Chinese ambitions in the South China Sea.

"If you believe American power is limited, this agenda is absurd. America needs Russian and Chinese support for an Iranian nuclear deal. U.S. officials can’t simultaneously put maximum pressure on both Assad and ISIS, the two main rivals for power in Syria today. They must decide who is the lesser evil. Accepting that American power is limited means prioritizing. It means making concessions to regimes and organizations you don’t like in order to put more pressure on the ones you fear most. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did when allying with Stalin against Hitler. It’s what Richard Nixon did when he reached out to communist China in order to increase America’s leverage over the U.S.S.R.

"And it’s what George W. Bush refused to do after 9/11, when he defined the 'war on terror' not merely as a conflict against al-Qaeda but as a license to wage war, or cold war, against every anti-American regime supposedly pursuing weapons of mass destruction. This massive overestimation of American power underlay the war in Iraq, which has taken the lives of a half-million Iraqis and almost 4,500 Americans, and cost the United States over $2 trillion. And it underlay Bush’s refusal to negotiate with Iran, even when Iran made dramatic overtures to the United States. Negotiations, after all, require mutual concessions, which Bush believed were unnecessary; if America just kept flexing its muscles, the logic went, Iran’s regime would collapse."

American power is not limitless, though, and Bush weakened us with his twin decade-long wars. Now we're left with a war-weary public and exhausted soldiers. Even if it were a good idea to invade Iran--which it's not--we'd have a hard time doing it. And if we're worried about Islamic terrorists, we need to remember that occupying yet another Muslim country would only spawn more.

The Iran deal can't be compared to perfect. It has to be looked at in light of what we can get, and what options we have. Given those options, a deal that forestalls their efforts to acquire nuclear weapons is a better bet than flexing our muscles and giving them more incentive to hurry that process. The president and Secretary of State should be commended for hanging in there, for crafting a deal that could open doors between old enemies that never talked, and that satisfied the goals of seven world powers. It's a victory for diplomacy, It required no bloodshed or loss of life. The world is a safer place, and will remain so, because of this effort. And in five years, or ten, when the doubts of the naysayers are proved wrong (as they have so often been, with this president), the world will still be a safer place.  (And we'll be paying less for gas.) The bigger danger now lies in the reaction of Israel's right-wing leadership.

Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund says, "The deal just struck by Iran, the United States, and five other world powers in Vienna is a major victory for U.S. national security. It shrinks Iran’s nuclear complex down to a token capability and wraps it in a permanent inspection and monitoring regime. The new agreement doesn’t overthrow the clerical regime ruling Iran. It doesn’t change Iran’s policies toward Israel or its Arab neighbors. And it doesn’t force Iran to end the repression of its own people. The agreement forged between Iran and the world’s powers does only one thing, but it is a big one: It reverses and contains what most experts consider the greatest nuclear proliferation challenge in the world. Whatever else Iran may do in the world, it will not do it backed with the threat of a nuclear weapon."

Josh Marshall at Taking Points Memo adds this:

"The Bush administration decided it wasn't going to go along with the Clinton administration's naive, give-away-everything negotiations with North Korea. The Bush team, particularly the first term team, decided they were going to hang tough and not be patsies for the North Koreans. And now North Korea is a nuclear state with a number of nuclear weapons. Maybe that would have happened had the Democrats won in 2000 too. But it did happen under the hang tough crowd.

"There's a lot of Iran pony thinking going on about what would be cool if we could have everything we want. But as much as I fear what a Republican president might do on the Iran front, I think going to war with Iran is highly unlikely. Stiffening sanctions won't happen because even if we stiffened sanctions, Europe and Russia and China won't. So all the folks saying it's not good enough or it's a disaster or whatever else are basically saying we should hang tough and let the Iranians do whatever they want. Indeed, adopt a maximal line of confrontation short of war, which will empower hardliners and make it more likely the Iranians will take the step from being a nuclear threshold state to an actual nuclear weapons state. It is the elevation of self-satisfaction over tangible results and reality."

And at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison writes, "This will limit Iran’s nuclear program more effectively than a decade of sanctions and coercive methods ever did, and it makes Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon much less likely than any other available course of action. The alternatives that Iran hawks have been proposing for the last two years–ending negotiations, more sanctions, threatening or taking military action–would have left Iran’s program under fewer constraints and would have pushed Iran towards building nuclear weapons. It is important to remember that the loudest, shrillest opponents of this deal would have made a nuclear-armed Iran more likely if they had their way."

Nuclear proliferation experts and former diplomats from both parties are overwhelmingly in favor of the deal as structured.

When President George W. Bush took office, Iran was not a nuclear power. They had a handful of centrifuges. He said they were part of the "Axis of Evil," and refused to talk to them. He invaded Iraq, removing Iran's biggest rival and allowing Iran incredible influence on Iraq, which it hadn't had with Saddam Hussein there. Bush refused to enforce sanctions against Iran (levied in the 1990s) because they might inhibit the global oil business. In 2006, Bush reversed course and his administration offered to negotiate with Iran (they contemplated a deal much like the one we got this week) but they didn't pursue the idea with much enthusiasm, and it went nowhere. By the time Bush left office, Iran had 8000 centrifuges, and the fracturing of Iraq had made Iran a stronger player in the region.

But President Obama came into office promising to talk to our foes as well as our friends. He wanted to be a peacetime president, though he inherited wars. He wanted to reduce, if not eliminate, the threat of nuclear war across the globe. What he didn't want was to start new wars. For generations, we've been on the brink of war with Iran, and now, suddenly, we're not. On the streets of Tehran the night the deal was made, throngs were in the streets chanting "Death to No One! Long Live Life!"

The deal arrived at this week stops Iran from getting a bomb, and it defuses the risk of war between Iran and the US. It was possible because President Obama brought together the world's major powers, each of which has its own agenda. He persuaded Russia and China--through intense negotiation over the first two years of his presidency--to agree to sanctions on Iran. Then, through Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, he held Iran to a good deal that shuts off all of the avenues they might use to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Wednesday, we woke to a world safer than it was on Monday. Obama might have received the Nobel Peace Prize prematurely. This week, he earned it.

Side Note: We don't know how many other presidents, if any, have referenced I Love Lucy, but this president did in a press conference about the deal. "You know, there are only so many uranium mines in Iran. And if in fact we're counting the amount of uranium that's being mined, and suddenly some is missing on the back end, they got some 'splainin' to do."

The press conference was also unusual for the gusto with which Obama addressed every question about the deal, asked for objections and criticism that he could answer. Law schools could show the video for a class in legal arguments.

Below the fold: Prison, 2016, Damages, Disgrace, Crazy, and. of course, Bears.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 28)

 

This Week in Wins

Congratulations to the US Women's National Soccer Team, the best in the world! 

This Week in Gun Safety

On July 31, 1967, Charles Whitman--Marine, mechanical engineering student, at one time the youngest boy ever to become an Eagle Scout, son of a physically abusive father who loved guns and taught Charles to hunt and fish--stabbed his mother and his wife to death, covered their bodies with sheets, and wrote a letter requesting that his body be autopsied after death to determine whether there was any physiological reason for his frequent and worsening headaches and the disturbing thoughts he couldn't shake.

The next morning, he rode the elevator up a tower at his college, the University of Texas at Austin, hauling a footlocker full of guns and ammunition, along with water, Dexedrine, knives, toilet paper, food, coffee, vitamins--everything he would need to camp out for a while. He lugged the footlocker up the stairs beyond where the elevator reached, and onto the observation deck. He barricaded himself in, killed three people and wounded another because they were in the vicinity, then started shooting from the tower at people on the ground. By the time police killed him about 90 minutes later, Whitman had killed 14 people and wounded 32 others.

On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people and wounded 17 others, then killed himself, at Virginia Tech. With a victim count of 49, he bested Whitman by one--though he managed to kill more than he wounded, while Whitman's was the reverse.

After the  Virginia Tech killings, an organization called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus was formed. They haven't had notable success, but on August 1, 2015--48 years to the day after Whitman's tower shootings (and 48, coincidentally, is Whitman's victim count)--a new Texas law requiring public universities to allow concealed carry on their campuses (except in specifically designated excluded areas) goes into effect.

The student body presidents of 13 Texas universities, representing around 300,000 students and another 100,000 faculty and staff, wrote to Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and pleaded with him to veto the bill. Abbott refused, and signed it into law at a shooting range in June.

Students for Concealed Carry has only 43,000 members, across 350 campuses nationwide. They've lost the vast majority of their bids for campus carry laws, but they keep trying, and as Texas shows, have occasional victories. But they're not strictly a campus-oriented group--rather, they're funded and organized by outside conservative groups associated with Gun Owners of America (GOA), which makes the NRA look wishy-washy on the subject of gun ownership. One of those behind the effort is an extremist named Larry Pratt. The Trace reports, "Pratt’s bedrock conviction is not simply a practical prescription for more guns to cure crime, nor is it ultimately to respect gun owner’s constitutional rights. Rather, he believes a righteous Christian citizenry needs its armaments to prevent a secular government from further alienating them from the kingdom of Christ. 'God,' Pratt writes, 'has revealed that weapons control is the practice of tyrants.'"

Part of the reason GOA and other organization push the campus carry issue so hard, despite its failure around the country, is to root out Republicans in Name Only (RINOs). Anyone who won't support their extreme ideology is automatically suspect. They take responsibility, for example, for the Republican primary loss of House majority leader Eric Cantor, one of the biggest electoral upsets in the 2014 electoral cycle. In a speech last year, Pratt said, " Look for those candidates that deserve our support. The Rand Pauls. The Ted Cruzes. The Steve Stockmans of the House. Try to multiply their number. The RINOs need to be humiliated. They need to be driven out of public life." (Paul was specifically not invited to speak at this year's NRA convention because of his close association with GOA.)

So campuses in Texas are about to become vastly more dangerous places--not because the students, administration, or faculty want it, but because conservative organizations want to flush out politicians who aren't extreme enough for them. We recommend that anyone enrolled or seeking to  enroll in Texas universities look out of state for an education. The life you save might be your own.

***

An intriguing approach to reducing gun crimes is permit-to-purchase (PTP). The idea is that before anyone can buy a gun, that person has to go to local law enforcement and pass a background check. Local law enforcement, the theory goes, has a better chance of knowing the individual than some national computer check would (and if that person is known to law enforcement for nefarious reasons, the permit can be easily denied). Once the permit is issued, it allows the bearer to buy guns for five years, from private sellers or gun stores or wherever.

Most firearms used in crimes are acquired from private sellers. PTP eliminates any burden on those private sellers to run background checks themselves, and gives them an assurance that the person they're selling to isn't a known criminal. Those that aren't bought privately are often bought through straw purchases--when a third party buys guns for someone who knows he won't pass a background check. With a national PTP system, the third-party buyer would have to present him- or herself to law enforcement and pass the background check, making it much less likely that such people would be willing to make those buys. A national system is a must, because otherwise criminals in states that use PTP will just go across the border into another state to get their guns.

The data show that PTP works. Will the NRA and the politicians beholden to it allow it to happen?

This Week in 2016

Speaking of Sen. Rand Paul (R/KY), It would be difficult to cover the 2016 Republican primaries without mentioning his name, because, like Donald Trump, Paul has few if any actual principles; he says whatever seems helpful at the moment--usually comments indicating he has no idea what he's talking about--and can say something entirely different to a different audience. Once the primary is over, of course, we won't have to talk about him so much, because there's no chance that he'll win the nomination.

But this week, he came very close to crossing the line beyond which his name becomes forbidden from appearing in this space, until he issues an apology. The case of a certain half-term governor and former losing vice presidential candidate demonstrates that line--she has not yet apologized for comparing the national debt to the horror of slavery, and she gets no free publicity from us.

Paul's comparison was slightly less explicit, but as we said, he came very close to the line, and if he crosses it, we'll have to strike his name from future posts. Touting his ridiculous, unaffordable flat-tax plan, Paul said, "I’m for paying some taxes. But if we tax you at 100% then you’ve got zero percent liberty. If we tax you at 50% you are half slave, half free. I frankly would like to see you a little freer and a little more money remaining in your communities so you can create jobs. It’s a debate we need to have."

No, Senator. That's wrong on so many levels. First of all, no one is taxed at 100%. Nobody but millionaires pays more than 30% in federal income taxes. Even during the Eisenhower era--when the economy was booming--the highest tax brackets were in the 90s. Since then they've become progressively lower, which hurts economic growth because the economy does better when the rich pay more in taxes--otherwise their money gets concentrated in bank accounts instead of working for the good of everyone. Leaving money in communities is a good idea--but do it by encouraging people to buy and spend locally, not by slashing taxes on the rich and cutting government spending. That's trickle-down economics, and that has never worked.

In our Constitution, we grant Congress (Article I, Section 8) the power of taxation. It's not theft. It's not slavery. It's what we pay in order to be free--what we pay for a military and courts and safe food and roads and bridges, and etc. It's part of what makes this a great country--because we're all willing to pitch in and make it great.

But the biggest point is this--paying taxes, even at 50%--which no rich person pays--is not slavery. Slavery means being treated as subhuman, bought and sold as chattel property, subject to rape or whatever forms of physical abuse an owner considers appropriate, having your family ripped apart by the whims of the marketplace, being worked to death laboring over something you don't own and never will, stripped of all human rights. You could be used to pay taxes, and as property you were subject to taxation, like income. There is, quite literally, nothing comparable to slavery. Slavery is its own, unique horror.

To equate paying taxes with slavery is a repulsive political tactic. We've never had much respect for Rand Paul, but if it's possible to have respect in the negative numbers, that's where we are now. What a foul, terrible thing to say, and to believe.

Of course, Paul and his father have a long history of association with white supremacists, so maybe they don't think slavery was all that bad. We here at TWiA World Headquarters wish Paul would grow a conscience and hide himself away somewhere until he learns something about...well, anything. If it takes decades, so much the better.

* * *

Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R/FL) gave a speech this week on his jobs/economic plan. It offers some intriguing ideas. but is probably impossible, or close to it, to put into practice. And much of it involves massive tax cuts for corporations and tax cuts for individuals, with no mention of how they'll be paid for--thereby adding trillions of dollars to the deficit. Interestingly, Republican politicians only pretend to care about deficits when there's a Democrat in the White House (which, incidentally, is when deficits shrink instead of growing).

* * *

We've been searching for a nicer way to say it, but nothing else is really apt: Donald Trump is so full of shit his hair is trying to emigrate to Mexico. In an interview this week (video here) he once more claimed that the Mexican government is choosing individual criminals to send across the border, making "their problems our problems." Then he said, ""I knew it was bad then [three years ago; the last time he was in Arizona] and it's worse now. It's worse now than it's ever been. We don't even have a border. People are flowing through like water."

In point of fact, it's the best it's ever been. Our southern border has never, in the history of the nation, been more secure than it is now. Trump, of course, never visits the border to see the real story. TWiA World Headquarters has never been situated more than a dozen miles or so from that border, so we have immediate knowledge of it. And we have facts, which Trump has apparently never heard of. As Francis Wilkerson writes at Bloomberg:

"Back when President Barack Obama was deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants -- 409,849 individuals in 2012 -- conservatives presented an alternate reality. 'The federal government has reached a point now where virtually no one is being deported, except those convicted of serious crimes,' Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, an arch immigration foe, said in June 2013.

"The conservative nightmare extended beyond the administration's allegedly cushy treatment of undocumented immigrants already settled in the U.S. Some conservatives, including Sessions, characterized Obama's border control as a policy of 'open borders.' (The plural of border is always a curious usage; none of these critics seems the least bit concerned about the Canadian frontier.) The lawless brown hordes streaming unchecked over the border and settling into a life of ease have been a recurring source of angst for some conservatives.

"In reality, the U.S. population of undocumented immigrants was about 12 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center, which is widely regarded as the most accurate source. By 2012, the number had fallen to about 11 million. In a mathematical miracle, all those people streaming north through 'open borders' led to a net decrease in undocumented immigrants in the country."

Wilkerson points out that the reason President Obama took immigration issues into his own hands, by executive order, is that although the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill, "in the House, the legislation fell before the thrashing sounds of recrimination and crazy."

With Donald Trump on the scene, the crazy has been jacked up even higher.

This Week in History

Speaking of Texas and slavery, the Washington Post tells us that:

"Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

"And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by 'sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery' — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education. Slavery was a 'side issue to the Civil War,' said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. 'There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.'"

No, it wasn't. The Post goes on to say, "Historians acknowledge that disagreements over states’ rights played a role in the Civil War. But the states’ rights issue was inseparable from slavery, they say: The right that states in the South were seeking to protect, after all, was the right to buy and sell people."

There's really no question about that in the historical community. The declarations of secession of the various southern states make it clear. Most of the southern states teach that slavery was the main cause. But Texans don't want their children to learn the truth of what happened, they want them to learn a bogus version of history in which racism didn't tear the country in two.

It's obvious that Rand Paul should go back to school to learn a little something about slavery. But he probably shouldn't study it in Texas. He's already ignorant enough.

This Week in Outreach

Staying in Texas for the moment, former Texas governor Rick Perry's 2012 campaign was derailed when he indicated during a debate that educating the children of undocumented immigrants was a moral necessity (then further derailed by his pain medication-induced "Oops," moment, when he couldn't remember the third federal department he wanted to abolish. Late last week, he showed that his comment about education was probably sincerely felt, by giving one of the most insightful speeches about race delivered by any Republican in years. Perry said:

"I know Republicans have much to do to earn the trust of African Americans. Blacks know that Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 ran against Lyndon Johnson, who was a champion for civil rights. They know that Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He felt parts of it were unconstitutional. States supporting segregation in the South, they cited states’ rights as a justification for keeping blacks from the voting booth and the dinner table."

 and:

"There has been and there will continue to be an important and a legitimate role for the federal government in enforcing civil rights. Too often, we Republicans — me included — have emphasized our message on the 10th Amendment but not our message on the 14th, an amendment, it bears reminding, that was one of the great contributions of the Republican Party to American life, second only to the abolition of slavery."

He did not, unfortunately, extend his concern for the African-American community as far as calling for the repeal of laws designed to make it harder for them and other Democratic-leaning groups to vote. He didn't address the fact that the gap between the rich and everyone else is considerably more extreme among the black community, nor did he talk about the many other ways in which systemic bias contribute to black underemployment and over-incarceration. But reminding Republicans that theirs is the party of Lincoln--and that they switched places with southern Democrats in the early 1960s, when the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights and the Republican Party embraced full-throated racism--is an important step toward moving beyond that racism and once more reaching out to all of America.

This Week in Austerity

The Weekly Sift ran the chart below this week, illustrating the different outcomes from the global recession between countries that embraced (however reluctantly) government stimulus vs. those that either embraced austerity or had it forced upon them (like Greece). Had President Obama not met with such stiff Congressional opposition, we could have had a bigger stimulus package, and his proposed jobs program would have passed, and that red line indicating American GDP growth would have shot up even faster and higher. The Republican Party as a whole, and the conservative movement in general, still seem determined to resist the reality of Keynesian economics, despite the many, many lessons of recent history showing that Keynes had it right.

 

(Thanks to TWiA special sift correspondent Marcy Rockwell for introducing us to the Sift.)

Side Note: In an indication of how little he understands about economics, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R/LA) said this week, "I’m running [for president] because I want to stop President Obama and Secretary Clinton from turning the American dream into the European nightmare. We are on the path towards socialism. It’s not too late, but the hour is late."

Two things wrong with this. 1) As the chart above shows, it's the conservative austerity agenda--echoed by Jindal, and put into practice in his state, with devastating results--that is the real European nightmare. The closer European economies hew to Keynesian economic principals, the stronger their economies. 2) There's nothing in Obama's history, or Clinton's, suggesting that either of them is a socialist. Bernie Sanders, yes. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Not even close.

Then Jindal doubled down on his nonsense by tweeting "If you want a peek into our future with Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, then look at what's happening to Greece today."  It's hard to fathom the degree of absurdity in that statement. Jindal's no dummy, so he must understand that what's happening to Greece today is largely the result of austerity forced on them by Germany and other EU countries. The current left-wing administration only took over in January, after the damage had been done. In other words, if you want to see what's happening in Louisiana, where Jindal's policies have skyrocketed debt and crushed growth, you can just look at Louisiana. Or you can look at Greece, where policies like Jindal's have wreaked havoc.

This Week in Economics

A new White House study finds that the reasons middle class income has stagnated are threefold, with the biggest reason being a decline in productivity since 1995. After that come income inequality and a plateau in the rate of women joining the workforce. The prescription, according to the Brookings Institution:

"The solution cannot be to slow down the pace of technology. It must be to encourage innovation, retrain workers, invest in the next generation, and help those dislocated by the changes. Yet we are not investing in research, in education, and in infrastructure in the same way we did in earlier decades. Taxes need to be reformed to provide greater simplicity, fairness, and growth. Policies such as paid leave, child care, and more flexible work places would encourage more second earners to join the labor force. Most innovation, to be sure, occurs in the private sector, but it has little incentive to invest as long as overall demand is constrained by policies that fail to mitigate financial instability or that are focused on short-term spending cuts in public investments combined with a longer-term explosion of consumption-oriented spending on the big entitlement programs. Until elected officials act to recreate these underpinnings of growth, any permanent improvements in middle class incomes are unlikely to be realized."

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State and local taxes can help correct inequality--or they can make it worse. Here's a map showing which states do which. It's probably not a huge surprise that the states that worsen inequality the most--by levying taxes that help the rich and hurt the poor and middle classes--are red states.

* * *

Economics continue to confound presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. A couple of weeks ago, he said his economic plan would produce 4% growth. People who understand economics were surprised--there's never been sustained 4% growth. And Bush didn't indicate how that magical number would be attained, or where it came from (though most believe he just pulled it out of his ass thin air).

This week he explained how we would achieve that--"people should work longer hours."

Got that, America? You're not working enough. And if you're working part-time because you can't find full-time work, that's your fault. Fix it.

Clarifying his statement--probably at the insistence of staff who told him how out of touch he sounded, he said, "You can take it out of context all you want, but high-sustained growth means that people work 40 hours rather than 30 hours and that by our success, they have money, disposable income for their families to decide how they want to spend it rather than getting in line and being dependent on government."

We can't find any indication that Jeb Bush has ever really worked at a job where he wasn't just a figurehead. He comes from a family of power and privilege. So he's just guessing about what it's like to work an 8- or 9-hour day, go home, make dinner, feed and bathe the kids, put them and yourself to bed, then get up in the morning and do it again.

He might not understand that Americans already work more hours and take less vacation time than people in any other industrialized country on the planet. And he might not understand that although there are too many people working part-time instead of full-time, that's not necessarily by choice. People would like full-time jobs. But his friends, the "job creators," would rather keep them at part-time so they can hold down payroll and deny benefits.

His dad lost to Bill Clinton in part because he was so out of touch with what basic staples cost Americans. It sounds like out of touch is a family trait. 

This Week in Aaaaah! Death Panels!

During the debate over the Affordable Care Act in 2009, the aforementioned half-term governor tried to scare Americans over what she called "death panels," which--according to her and some other shameless liars--would be able to decide whether Grandma would live or die. That was never remotely true, of course.

Now they're coming back, because Medicare is going to start paying doctors to have end-of-life conversations with patients (something many doctors did without payment, because it's important. Says the Washington Post, "If a doctor is treating, for example, a 68-year-old man with heart failure and diabetes who is taking multiple medications, the talks could include long-term treatment options, such as a heart transplant if his congestive heart failure worsened. They also could deal with advance care planning, including a patient’s desire for treatment if a health problem 'adversely affects his decision-making capacity.'"

At Vox.com, health care writer Sarah Kliff goes into more detail:

"Neither the Affordable Care Act nor these new regulations will let any government panel decide what end-of-life care is or isn't appropriate for patients.

"Patients, meanwhile, face a different and very significant loss of autonomy when they don't have these conversations. They don't get to decide what type of death they want, what goals will be important to them, and what type of life-sustaining treatment they'd prefer. ...

"Unarticulated end-of-life decisions get outsourced to family members and doctors, who make their best guess at what a loved one would have wanted. Without advance care planning, patients end up living a version of the scenario that the death panel rhetoric made so fearsome: giving over decisions about their last moments of life to another party."

Encouraging doctors to have these conversations--and paying them so they don't feel they have to rush through it--is a positive good. Said half-term governor and her allies should be ashamed of using them as a scare tactic in the past, and everybody should get behind the idea now.

This Week in Benghazi

It's hard to remember an incident that has been more thoroughly investigated than the unfortunate deaths of four Americans in the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. If every report hadn't reached essentially the same conclusion--administration personnel, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Pentagon, did everything in their power, from a distance, but those lives could not have been saved--it might be worth continuing to "investigate." But the committee's true purpose has been to try to embarrass the Obama administration, and as Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential run looked more certain, to embarrass her.

So far, they've only embarrassed themselves, and now they've done so again by leaking doctored "information" designed to discredit Clinton. Fortunately, committee member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D/MD) busted them on it. They've done the same thing before, and been caught then, too.

If there were a genuine scandal to be uncovered, doesn't it seem like one of these many investigations would have revealed it? And the Republicans on the committee wouldn't have to lie about what they've found? Expect continued dishonesty from that committee until the 2016 presidential race is decided. Then it might finally disband. We can hope, anyway.

This Week in Bad Taste

A white supremacist/neo-Nazi website called Stormfront has been linked to more murders than any other individual website, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Even Anders Breivik, the far-right murderer of 77 people in Norway, had a regular presence on the site. It appears that the shooter in the massacre at Emanuel AME church did, too. As a result, the founder of the site--claiming that free speech is under attack--is now fundraising off the massacre and its aftermath.

This Week in Bears

Bears are nothing if not polite when they go visiting.

And if they're lost and hungry, they'll climb into your raft for help.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 27)

This edition is being released on Thursday, because of the Independence Day holiday. Happy Fourth, America!

Last Week in History

Last week was a remarkable one in many ways. Marriage equality. The Affordable Care Act made permanent. Symbols of the Confederacy recognized for the racist statements they really are, and torn down from places of honor. The nation's first black president imperfectly leading a church full of black Americans in hymn, and insisting, in so many words, that the African-American experience is part and parcel of the American experience--not separate- but-equal, but another thread in the ever-lengthening cord of our history.

At Bloomberg, Francis Wilkinson wrote, "This may be the week the 21st century really began in America."

He just may be right. Beginning this week felt like waking up in a new America, one in which the arc of the moral universe has bent a little further toward justice.

This Week in Looking Backward

President Obama announced this week that the US and Cuba will have formal diplomatic relations, including embassies in each other's capitals. Republicans in Congress immediately announced that they would block any such actions, including refusing to confirm anyone nominated as an ambassador to Cuba. 

Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX), who is of Cuban descent, said, "I, for one, want the Cuban people to know that there are still those who stand with them, and who know the Castros for what they are. I will hold any nominee President Obama sends to the Senate to be ambassador to Cuba, and I will work to disapprove any new funds for embassy construction in Havana, unless and until the President can demonstrate that he has made some progress in alleviating the misery of our friends, the people of Cuba.”

Cruz might want to ask the actual Cuban people, who are in favor of normalized relations with the US. As are the American people, by 60%. Cruz and the rest are arguing to keep relations between the two countries the way they've been for the last half-century. Somehow, they imagine, continuing to do the same thing we've been doing will, any day now, produce different results. Logic tells us that's highly unlikely.

This Week in 2016

Chris Christie of New Jersey dove into the Republican primary pool this week, splashing all the water out of it. Unlike some--Bobby Jindal (LA), for instance, or John Kasich (OH) whenever he gets in--Christie has plenty of national name recognition. It's not necessarily positive name recognition, but it's there. Christie is tainted by the ongoing Bridgegate scandal and by his bullying personality, which comes across refreshing to some people but turns grating in a hurry. He's deeply unpopular in his home state (second in gubernatorial unpopularity only to Jindal), where his economic agenda has cratered the state's finances and he's responsible for more debt downgrades  than any governor in the state's history.

New Jersey's biggest newspaper, the Star-Ledger, published an editorial the day before Christie's announcement, attacking him in a way we've rarely seen.

"Most Americans don't know Chris Christie like I do, so it's only natural to wonder what testimony I might offer after covering his every move for the last 14 years.

"Is it his raw political talent? No, they can see that.

"Is it his measurable failure to fix the economy, solve the budget crisis or even repair the crumbling bridges? No, his opponents will cover that if he ever gets traction.

"My testimony amounts to a warning: Don't believe a word the man says.

"If you have the stomach for it, this column offers some greatest hits in Christie's catalog of lies.

"Don't misunderstand me. They all lie, and I get that. But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out."

The editorial details several of Christie's more flagrant lies, and concludes thusly:

"And that's my warning to America. When Christie picks up the microphone, he speaks so clearly and forcefully that you assume genuine conviction is behind it.

"Be careful, though. It's a kind of spell.

"He is a remarkable talent with a silver tongue. But if you look closely, you can see that it is forked like a serpent's."

Judging from that, it sounds like with Christie in the race, Mendacious Mitt Romney might have competition for the most blatantly dishonest presidential candidate in our memory, if not in American history.

Christie also has the "benefit" of earning the first endorsement of the 2016 cycle by a sitting governor (yes, there are a few who aren't running for the nomination themselves)--only he was endorsed by the utterly insane Paul LePage of Maine, who might very well be facing impeachment.

Christie's one and only real shot at the presidency was four years ago, when mainstream and hardcore conservative Republicans, big donors and tea party pundits alike, were all begging him to get in the race (before he "betrayed" them by working with President Obama to clean up the mess Hurricane Sandy left behind). But he didn't want to run against an incumbent who was still broadly popular with the American people, and every bit as gifted a politician as Christie himself. Whether it was cowardice that kept Christie out, or the certain knowledge that he couldn't win, the ensuing years have ruined his reputation and cost him dearly in support from his own constituents. Nobody's asking him to get in now, except perhaps the cast of SNL, who pray that Christie and Donald Trump will wind up on debate stages together.

Below the fold: More 2016, jobs, religious liberty, SCOTUS, and bears!