This Week in America

#HappyNewYear from TWiA

Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza is an outstanding photojournalist. Each year he selects 100 of his favorite photographs from the previous year (taken by him and the handful of staff photographers who work for him). This year, that collection is here. We've swiped a handful to show off his range (all photos by Pete Souza).

The president drops in on Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg at his new home in Gilbert, AZ. He had previously met Remsburg in Normandy, and then ran into him again at Walter Reed Hospital after Remsburg was wounded in Afghanistan. 

The night the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, White House staffers stayed late to celebrate.

Kids like the president, and vice versa. This is Ayla Dorilien Bitar and her parents.

One more with kids. This is Ella Rhodes, daughter of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, in an Ella-phant costume for Halloween.

Working at the Resolute Desk one autumn afternoon. We love the light here.

POTUS and FLOTUS holding hands while listening to Rep. John Lewis speak at the 50th anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, AL.

Boarding Marine One (which we were fortunate enough to see in flight over the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2014).

 

For another year-end note, read the farewell column by 40-year Washington Post veteran Walter Pincus, which includes this pearl of wisdom:

The Islamic State, as with al-Qaeda, al-Shabab and other current terrorist groups, needs to be put in some perspective. After 9/11, a very wise intelligence officer told me in 2002, “We have turned 16 clever al-Qaeda terrorists into a worldwide movement, seemingly more dangerous to Americans than the communist Soviet Union with thousands of nuclear missiles.”

Never at the height of the Cold War did we institute the security actions at home that have been taken and are being contemplated to meet what’s been described as the current terrorist threat. President Obama put it in perspective during a Dec. 21, National Public Radio interview when he said, “This is not an organization that can destroy the United States . . . But they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people and our families. And so I understand why people are worried. The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are.”

 

And that's a wrap. See you next year.

This Week in America (Week 52.2, Happy New Year Edition)

Once again, we're publishing on Wednesday, then taking New Year's Eve and New Year's Day off. More next year! 

This Week in 2016

Self-awareness much? Dr. Ben Carson, who was once briefly a front-runner in Iowa, spoke this week about the difficulties of running for president (emphasis ours): “Well, it’s not pleasant. The encouraging thing was there were so many people saying, 'You know they’re going to do this, just hang in there.' Every place I go, that’s all people say: 'Please don’t quit. Please stay in there. We need you.' That is encouraging. But it’s discouraging to know that we’re at that stage in our country where people don’t care so much about the truth. "

Most politicians lie once in a while. Sometimes it's "justifiable"--people with security clearances aren't supposed to tell people without them everything they know, and occasionally it will be incumbent upon an elected official to speak about some topic about which the whole truth can't be told. Others--Mitt Romney, say, or Donald Trump, say whatever they think is politically expedient, whether or not there's any truth to it. And some are just plain ignorant.

Carson is an educated man, but apparently his education had a very narrow focus, because on many topics outside the arena of brain surgery, he's just loony. It isn't just saying that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain and there's a Star of David on the $1 bill. The Weekly Sift did us the favor of summarizing some of Carson's other crazy ideas: "The Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if Germany’s Jews had been armed; anarchy might force the 2016 elections to be cancelled; Russian president Putin, Palestinian leader Abbas, and Iranian leader Khamenei were all students together in 1968; Medicare and Medicaid fraud amounts to half a trillion dollars; Satan motivated Darwin to create the theory of evolution; and the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience. He found fault with the victims of a mass shooting. He told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” He wants to use the Department of Education to police liberal (but not conservative) bias at colleges and universities (and justified the need for such policing by citing an event that didn’t quite happen the way he claimed)."

Carson has said all that, and more. What's worse is that he seems to believe it. He still believes his pyramid theory, despite knowing what others say about it. "My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids in order to store grain. Now, all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big — when you stop and think about it, and I don’t think it would just disappear over the course of time — to store that much grain."

His wacky idea is more convincing to him than "all the archaeologists." But he's losing ground because "people don't care so much about the truth"? The rise and continued success of Trump's campaign indicates that Carson might be right on that point--but it obviously doesn't explain Carson's decline in the polls, because his relationship to the truth is distant at best.

* * *

A couple of weeks ago, we speculated that people would stop bailing out of the Republican race until after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. We were wrong. This week, former New York governor George Pataki fell on his sword.

In the abstract, Pataki and Chris Christie look like ideal candidates. They both have executive experience. They're Republicans who won multiple elections in two of the deepest-blue states in the nation. Having run New York and New Jersey, both can lay claim to aspects of the 9/11 experience. They're fiscally conservative but (for Republicans, anyway) socially moderate.

Instead, in this year's Republican Party, those are all strikes against them. Christie's gaining some traction in New Hampshire, but Pataki had none. Relegated to the kiddie table debates, short on funds and staff, he couldn't even see a reason to hold on. More than that--like Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Lindsey Graham before him--he hopes that by getting out, the anti-Trump (and anti-Cruz) forces will be able to gather behind a more establishment choice. Right now, that choice is Rubio, but although Rubio's decent at memorizing and delivering his lines (like "a computer algorithm designed to cover talking points," according to one reporter), he's proving to be a lousy strategist.

Still, with Jeb! unable to make any headway, it's looking more than ever like it'll come down to a final four of Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and Christie. We can see a ticket combining Rubio and Christie having some appeal (although the fight for who gets which slot could be bloody). A Northeasterner with executive experience who can win crossover votes and a Florida Hispanic who looks and sounds good on the stump might be a potent Republican ticket.

If the modern Republican Party is willing to overlook their various acts of reasonableness (Christie embracing Obama's aid--and Obama--after Superstorm Sandy, Rubio being for real immigration reform before he was against it), that is.

* * *

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson usually makes some pretty good points, and he does the same here, coming around to a topic we've been discussing for months now. Being limited in space, some of his arguments are overly simplistic (blaming the hollowing of the middle class just on globalization is vastly so--it's a factor, not the factor). But his main point is this: "History will remember 2015 as the year when The Republican Party As We Knew It was destroyed by Donald Trump. An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same." And there, he's largely correct.

Nut again, overly simplistic. Trump isn't destroying the party by himself. He's the visual avatar of its destruction, but the forces driving it have been operating for years. Decades, really.

There's a common trope in science fiction and horror stories, in which somebody messes with forces beyond his (usually) power to control, and then suffers the consequences. Think Frankenstein. Think any story in which a demon is summoned, but the demon proves unwilling to be reined in by the summoner. Those could all have been cautionary tales for a political party willing to embrace Richard Nixon's¹ Southern Strategy--to rely on racism, subtle and explicit, for electoral advantage. That only works by pitting Americans against each other, by telling the favored group that their problems are caused by those "others," but we will take care of you.

In a country with rapidly changing demographics and a steady arc of social justice that demands inclusion, not exclusion, that says that all Americans deserve not special rights but equal rights, that doesn't work for long. The party has to keep redefining the "other" based on the latest trends: blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, gays, etc. And tactics have to change, too--after years of accepting and renewing the Voting Rights Act, for instance, the party came to realize that voting by those "others" needed to be curtailed, not encouraged.

The stakes had to be upped constantly, which meant the rhetoric became more heated, which meant the people who believed the rhetoric became more extreme in their views. For years, Republicans have been throwing moderates out of office and electing ever more conservative candidates. Not that long ago, Republicans could believe in climate change and reasonable gun laws and a minimum wage. Now even those basics are under attack like never before.

The choice of Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee in 2008² should have given pause to any thinking conservative, a signal that the party was finally swinging too far to recover. Instead, conservatives embraced her, despite her lack of accomplishment, discernible intelligence, or suitability for office, because she articulated the latest iteration of right-wing rage. She was the pre-Trump that should have been a red alert. The Tea Party wave of 2010 was another warning, although by then it was probably too late to turn back. The establishment tried mightily to reverse the ship's course in 2012 by nominating Mitt Romney, but that was way too little, too late.

So now we have Trump, and a party barely recognizable to those who knew it before. Blatant racism, full-on denial of reality, and incoherent anger are now acceptable behavior among supporters of the Republican front-runner. It's not Trump who has remade the party--Trump is riding the wave of a party that has remade itself by taking every logical next step since the success of the Southern Strategy in 1968.

Robinson acknowledges all this, if you read between his lines. He concludes with this:

Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.

The party might nominate Trump, in which case the establishment will have lost all control. Or party leaders might somehow find a way to defeat him, in which case they will have lost the allegiance of much of the base. In either event, the GOP we once knew is irredeemably a thing of the past.

 Again, he's right about that. The wave of change is not Trump's doing. But he's riding it as far as he can.

 

¹ Charlie Pierce at Esquire reminds us of another Nixonian moment, linking it to this election season's drugs conversation (which he agrees is less emotionally charged, and conceivably more useful, than some past ones):

But as the crisis moves into our politics, it's helpful to recall this remarkable interview that former Nixon henchman John Ehrlichman gave to Dan Baum as part of Baum's Smoke and Mirrors, Baum's essential history of the "war" on drugs.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

² We're not blaming Palin for this one--it might not even have been conscious--but ads run by the McCain campaign in 2008 consistently portrayed Barack Obama's skin as darker than it really is, and that became more pronounced as the campaign wore on--even as McCain's skin was shown as lighter and lighter.

* * *

On the other side of the argument, Matt Yglesias at Vox.com sees a Republican Party in great shape--one that, if it can elect a Republican president in 2016, will literally "control the levers of American government at all levels." He could well be right, but that doesn't really negate Robinson's point. Whatever the party is after the election, however dominant it may be politically, it will be a different party than it was--more extremist, less tethered to reality, and more dependent than ever on a politics of fear and racial animus.

Which makes his prediction even scarier. If that kind of politics controls every aspect of American government, it won't just be the party that's unrecognizable, but the country.

* * *

On the Democratic side, Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley held a meet-and-greet event in Iowa, during a surprise bout of winter weather, that was attended by only one person. Fortunately for O'Malley, that person was Santa Claus, relaxing in civilian clothes after the Christmas rush, and Rudolph had been available to get him to the event through the furious storm. Mr. Claus is expected to be able to enlist the support of numerous elves (some of whom are undocumented workers who can't vote).

 

Photograph from @SarahBeckman3

 

Below the fold, inequality, guns, predictions, Dave Barry's annual wrap-up, bears, and more! Keep reading!

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 52.1, Merry Christmas Edition)

There are only 52 weeks in a calendar year, so we're not calling this one week 53. We won't next week, either.

We're posting on Wednesday this week. Merry Christmas, if you celebrate, and we'll see you on the other side.

 

Photograph from the White House Twitter feed

 

This Week in 2016

Senator Lindsey Graham, who we've never thought of as a voice of reason, was nonetheless one of the sole semi-reasonable voices in the Republican primaries. Our favorite Graham quote of the season: "You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell."

That occasional reasonableness, and the facts that he believes in climate science and he's not ready to declare war on the entire religion of Islam (an opinion that should carry some weight, as he's the only major candidate running in either party with military experience--Jim Gilmore is also a veteran, but if you respond to that news with "Who?" you're not alone), probably account for the fact that he never picked up much support, or many donations, and never once made it onto the main stage for the Republican debates. He left the race on Monday morning. We're a little sorry to see him go. But we expect he'll have a merrier Christmas than if he had stayed in--the relief must be palpable.

 * * *

The other occasionally semi-reasonable person in the Republican race is Ohio governor John Kasich. Like Graham, he hasn't gained any traction, but at least he's been on the main stage throughout. This week, he's trolling Donald Trump's newfound bromance with Vladimir Putin with a Trump-Putin 2016 website. The ticket's slogan: "Make Tyranny Great Again."

In Putin, Trump sees "a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

Just as a point of comparison, in the foreign policy arena, the leader of this country has brought the vast majority of troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, marshaled an international coalition to battle ISIS, ended an absurd 50-year embargo against Cuba, forged a climate deal with China and helped lead the world in a broader climate deal agreed to by 195 countries, and helped negotiate a cease-fire in the ongoing Syrian civil war. Putin has invaded Ukraine and bombed moderate rebel groups opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

But to Trump, that's a leader.

* * *

Before his campaign flamed out and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker went back to ruining his own state, he tried to make the case that because he had taken on teachers and DMV workers by attacking public sector unions, he could take on ISIS. He was, appropriately, laughed out of the race for that one. But now former governor Jeb! Bush, whose own campaign is flailing, is making an even sillier claim. “One candidate tough enough to take on the bully. . . . One candidate tough enough to take on ISIS.” The "bully" is Donald Trump, and Jeb!'s idea of taking him on is to tell him onstage that he can't insult his way to the presidency, then call him a "jerk" offstage. We agree that Trump is a jerk. We don't agree that calling him names behind his back demonstrates any particular strength. Calling ISIS names doesn't seem to help, either.

* * *

As if there weren't enough reasons not to support Trump, he just won the endorsement of one of the people least likely to make good decisions in the country (and possibly the universe)--the execrable Phyllis Schafly, whose every public utterance is part of a decades-long river of hate. No candidate can be held responsible for the endorsements they get (unless, like Ron Paul in 2012, they pay for them), but when a politician promotes the endorsement, that's a different story. We don't see Trump trumpeting the endorsements of white supremacist David Duke and his friends, for instance. But he seems to like Schafly's.

* * *

There are also plenty of reasons not to support Sen. Ted Cruz, but if you need more, how about the fact that he's supported by far-right extremists like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin? These three are professional blowhards who earn a living by dividing and frightening Americans, spewing bile, and promoting un-American ideas that go against the grain of the open and accepting society we should be.

* * *

As we reported last week, CNN broke its own rules at the last minute to include Rand "Crybaby" Paul in a main-stage debate for which he had not qualified. This week, Fox Business "News" is talking about tightening the criteria for the next Republican debate, such that those on the main stage would have to have 6% or better poll ratings to get in. Since only a miracle could get Paul to 6%, he's now decided to raise a fuss, saying it's a "real mistake for the media to be given so much power to select who has a chance and who doesn't have a chance," because "the polls have been wildly inaccurate."

Let's just unpack that a little. First, we have no idea how accurate the polls have been, because there hasn't been a single vote cast yet. Until Iowans go to the caucuses and the polls close in New Hampshire, we won't have any yardstick by which to measure poll accuracy.

Second, Paul had no problem with these arrangements when he was safely on the main stage. Candidates with considerably better track records than his--Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham, Chris Christie, and George Pataki, to name just a few--have been relegated to the kiddie table debate. Any one of them is a more likely president than Rand Paul. But The Crybaby didn't kick up a fuss when his betters were pushed from the main stage. Now that he might be, he whines, "“I frankly just won’t be told by the media which tier I’m in, and we’re not willing to accept that, because we’re a first-tier campaign and we’re in it to win it and we won’t be told that we’re in a tier that can’t win."

"In it to win it" is a cheap cliche, which makes it just right for the ego-trip that is his campaign. Paul has no shot at the nomination, and he knows it, which is why he was so desperate to also stay on the Kentucky senatorial ballot. But the Paul family has long mined their mailing lists for mail-order gold, and that's what Rand Paul is all about, too. He won't become president, but he hopes to become wealthy, and the longer he stays in, the more names he gets on the list.

We wouldn't accuse Paul of having principles, since he has shown so many times over his few years in the Senate that he only has positions, which he's perfectly willing to change depending on who he's addressing. But if he did have principles, he would have raised these objections earlier in the primary process. The fact that it's only a problem now is one more indication that to Rand Paul, it's all about Rand Paul.

We hope FBN stands firm, and Paul decides to boycott the debate altogether. That'll put him one step closer to retiring from politics, which would be the best belated Christmas present The Crybaby could give America.

* * *

Hillary Clinton this week unveiled a plan to spend $2 billion a year in an effort to cure Alzheimer's Disease by 2025. No presidential candidate has ever made Alzheimer's a major campaign issue, but it makes sense. USA Today reports: "Congress significantly boosted funding levels in 2016, yet it’s still less than half of what researchers say they need every year. It’s an investment, they say, that would be recouped in the first three years after discovery of a treatment. The alternative is an estimated $1.1 trillion in costs for Medicare, Medicaid and caretakers in 2050."

They add: "Almost two-thirds of the people over age 65 who have Alzheimer’s are women, as are a majority of Alzheimer’s and dementia caregivers. Older African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to develop it than their white counterparts. Overall, about 5.3 million Americans have the disease, leading to $226 billion a year in costs. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved a new compound to treat the disease in more than a decade, and the potential consequences for public health and the federal budget are immense."

This Week in Bragging Rights

Trump might think Barack Obama isn't much of a leader, and among his followers and others on the right, that's a common belief. It's also wrong. The President, usually not much for tooting his own horn, started a year-end press conference this way:

As I look back on this year, one thing I see is that so much of our steady, persistent work over the years is paying off for the American people in big, tangible ways.  Our early actions to rescue the economy set the stage for the longest streak of private sector job growth on record, with 13.7 million new jobs in that time.  The unemployment rate has been cut in half -- down to 5 percent.  And most importantly, wages grew faster than at any time since the recovery began.  So, over the course of this year, a lot of the decisions that we made early on have paid off. 
  
Years of steady implementation of the Affordable Care Act helped to drive the rate of the uninsured in America below 10 percent for the first time since records were kept on that.  Health care prices have grown at their lowest levels in five decades; 17 million more Americans have gained coverage, and we now know that six million people* have signed up through HealthCare.gov for coverage beginning on January 1st -- 600,000 on Tuesday alone.  New customers are up one-third over last year. And the more who sign up, the stronger the system becomes.  And that's good news for every American who no longer has to worry about being just one illness or accident away from financial hardship.

On climate, our early investment in clean energy ignited a clean energy industry boom.  Our actions to help reduce our carbon emissions brought China to the table.  And last week, in Paris, nearly 200 nations forged an historic agreement that was only possible because of American leadership.   

Around the world -- from reaching the deal to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, to reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, to concluding a landmark trade agreement that will make sure that American workers and American businesses are operating on a level playing field and that we, rather than China or other countries, are setting the rules for global trade -- we have shown what is possible when America leads. 

And, after decades of dedicated advocacy, marriage equality became a reality in all 50 states.

That's a record to be proud of. And he still has a year to go. 

*The total has since been revised to 8 million +.

This Week in the President's Faith

Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post has written an article detailing how President Obama's faith informs all of his policy decisions.

Obama did not grow up in a religious household and became a practicing Christian as an adult. He has written more extensively about his spiritual awakening than almost any other modern president, addressing it in two books before he was elected to the White House and in more than a dozen speeches since.

His faith had been central to his identity as a new kind of Democrat who would bring civility to the country’s political debates by appealing to Republicans through the shared language of their Judeo-Christian values.

With just one year left in his second term, Obama now holds a different distinction: No modern president has had his faith more routinely questioned and disparaged. Recent polls show that 29 percent of Americans and nearly 45 percent of Republicans say he is a Muslim.

After the shootings at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, Obama gave a stirring eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who he had known. More than a simple eulogizing of the man, though, Obama spoke at length about faith, what it means to him, and what it means to the nation. Jaffe describes how the speech came to be:

In the days before the funeral, Obama’s speechwriter, Cody Keenan, compiled 19 pages of notes on the families and their church. He reread James Baldwin to help him think about race relations and a Holocaust-era theologian — Dietrich Bonhoeffer — to better understand the nature of tragedy and grace.

Keenan turned in the first draft of the speech at 5 p.m. on the evening before Obama was to speak. Five hours later, the president called him back to the White House. The first two pages were largely intact with the president’s notes and thoughts jotted in the margins. The final two pages had been completely rewritten in longhand on a legal pad.

After eight years of working for Obama, Keenan had become adept at channeling the president’s fluid writing style, his thoughts and even his feelings onto the page. “But, there are times where it’s just impossible,” he said. He started to apologize, but the president stopped him.

“When you’ve been thinking about this stuff for 30 years, you’ll know what you want to say, too,” Obama said.

Obama knows what he believes, and what he wants to say. In Charleston, he said it. For seven years, he's acted on it, trying to help us become a more just, more hopeful society. Jaffe tells us what's in store for the next 12 months:

In his final year in office, Obama hopes to work with Republicans and evangelical Christians on criminal justice reform. He will make a renewed push on gun control and the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“He’s trying to figure out how to get a lot of these big things he cares about out of the box of political opportunism and into a more humanistic space,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning for the president’s final year in office.

This Week in Terror

On Monday, police searched the home of a man who had been making threats against the local Muslim community and found a bomb, which they detonated. The man is a big fan of Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton might have overstated the point in the Saturday Democratic debate when she said that ISIS is using Trump videos as a recruiting tool. There's no evidence of that, to date. But there is evidence that they're using some of his statements. Now we see that he's radicalizing both sides--spurring right-wing, anti-Muslim lone wolves into action and ginning up white supremacists. Whether he's hoping to gin up a religious war or just pandering to the particularly enraged and violent aspects of his base, he's playing a dangerous game.

This Week in Health Care

During the debate on Saturday, Martha Raddatz of ABC asked Clinton a question about rising health insurance rates. Raddatz prefaced the question with this statistic: "Secretary Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 17 million Americans who are not insured now have health coverage because of Obamacare. But for Americans who already had health insurance the cost has gone up 27 percent in the last five years while deductibles are up 67 percent, health care costs are rising faster than many Americans can manage."

In the moment, we were live-tweeting, and we wrote, "Let's not pretend premiums didn't rise every year pre-Obamacare."

Tierney Sneed at Talking Points Memo went into more detail on the subject:

It should be noted that health insurance policies purchased in the Obamacare marketplaces -- a major element of the Affordable Care Act -- first went into effect on Jan. 1, 2014. So any discussion of costs over the last five years straddles the pre- and post-Obamacare worlds.

While it's unclear exactly the role Obamacare played, the growth of premiums has been lower in the last few years than it was in periods prior, according to a 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation report that was highlighted by FactCheck.org.

That report showed that, yes, premiums increased for covered workers with family coverage by 26 percent between 2009-2014. However, between 2004-2009 those premiums rose by 34 percent, and between 1999-2004 they rose by a whooping 72 percent.

A 2015 report by the the nonpartisan foundation the Commonwealth Fund also showed that premium growth rates had slowed in 31 states and the District of Columbia between 2010 and 2013, when compared to premiums between 2003 and 2010.

Blaming the ACA for not being able to do enough, in its few short years of existence (and against overwhelming Republican opposition that refuses to consider any fixes to the law), to rein in costs largely attributable to the profit motive of the businesses involved is more than a little unfair.

This Week in Inequality

We wrote a couple of weeks ago about the terrific series of long, informative articles on inequality being published at Talking Points Memo. Now the fourth and final installment is up. It's by economist J. Bradford DeLong, who takes a close look at the arguments made by French economist Thomas Piketty in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Delong's piece is in many ways the weakest of the set--perhaps not economically, but in that he's a lesser writer, far too at home in the language of other economists than of regular people. His conclusions, such as they are, make a certain amount of sense, but that's largely because he doesn't reach any solid conclusion, only a couple of different possible futures. We might, he suggests, be able to choose which future we want to live in. But he's not hopeful about that, since it would require that the many drown out the voices of the moneyed few in our politics (not just here in the US, but among the societies of the "North Atlantic economy." Failing that, what we have to look forward to is a new plutocracy, one where the very rich have whatever they want and the rest of us scrabble in the dirt for the scraps they leave us.

We'd like to be more optimistic than that. But DeLong isn't leaving us much in the way of straws to grasp at.

This Week in Gun Safety

Statistics continue to show that places with more guns have more gun violence. There's no definitive causal link--do more people buy guns* because there's so much gun violence? Or is there so much gun violence because there are so many guns? Or is there some other factor at work?

Can gun violence be affected by laws restricting ownership? The evidence is slim--in part thanks to persistent efforts by Republicans to block any federal funding for it--but the examples of a couple of states points to yes.

Missouri used to have one of the toughest gun laws in the country. Anyone buying a gun, even from a private seller, had to go to the local sheriff's office and pass a background check to get a permit. In 2007, they repealed that law. In 2014, they lowered the age at which someone can carry a concealed weapon to 19. It's still too soon to know what effect that has, but it's been almost a decade since the background check requirement was changed (now people buying at gun shops have to pass a background check when buying guns at stores, although those checks are considered less thorough, and there might be some psychological deterrent about doing it at the sheriff's office vs. filling out a form in a store--and a permit is no longer required. There's no longer any background check required for private sales.), and there are some pretty clear data.

Research by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri.

Federal death data released this month for 2014 showed a continuation of the trend, he said. Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher. (The new data also showed that the national death rate from guns was equal to that from motor vehicle crashes for the first time since the government began systematically tracking it.)

Other measures suggested that criminals had easier access to guns after the permit law was repealed. Professor Webster analyzed data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and found that the share of guns that were linked to crimes soon after they were bought doubled in the state from 2006 to 2010. The portion of guns confiscated by the police in Missouri that had been originally bought in the state — ordinarily a very stable statistic — rose to 74 percent last year, from 56 percent before the law changed.

Last week, we wrote about the different patterns in gun deaths between whites and blacks. Most white people who killed by guns are suicides, while most blacks are homicides. The pattern holds true in Missouri, post-repeal, as well. "The state legislature is predominantly white, rural and suburban, but the effects of the laws it makes are felt largely in Missouri’s cities, where gun homicides are one of the biggest causes of death for young black men. In Professor Webster’s analysis, the gun homicide rate rose by 20 percent in metropolitan areas of Missouri, but was up by just 1.6 percent in rural areas. However, gun suicides, largely a rural, white problem, rose by about 16 percent in the years after the repeal, he found."

There's also evidence going the other way. It's too soon to have reliable data from states that passed background check laws post-Sandy Hook, but Connecticut passed one in 1995, giving us a decade of data. "Missouri was the only state in recent history to repeal a law requiring background checks and permits for all handgun sales, and Professor Webster said he had been drawn to study the aftermath because many had considered that type of law to be the most effective at keeping guns from people who should not have them. In 1995 Connecticut enacted a law similar to the one Missouri repealed, and gun homicides declined by 40 percent in the 10 years that followed, he found."

*One fact working against that idea is that we aren't necessarily seeing more households owning guns; nationwide, most of the increase in gun ownership is due to households that already have guns buying more of them.

* * *

There's also evidence, though more research needs to be done, that limiting access to guns decreases suicides.

* * *

"The only reason you have not been shot is because nobody has yet decided to shoot you." The Trace offers the 16 most powerful sentences about gun violence published in 2015.

* * *

Last week, 15-year-old Zaevion Dobson, a starting linebacker at Fulton High School in Knoxville, TN, died using his body to shield three teenage girls from random gunfire.  We honor his heroism, and mourn its necessity.

This Week in Alcohol

There are, of course, plenty of other ways to die. According to the Washington Post, "Alcohol is killing Americans at a rate not seen in at least 35 years, according to new federal data. Last year, more than 30,700 Americans died from alcohol-induced causes, including alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis, which is primarily caused by alcohol use."

Note--that doesn't include accidental deaths, from drunk driving or other causes, and it doesn't include someone else under the influence of alcohol shooting you (or you starting and losing a drunken bar brawl). If you factor those in, the total spikes to almost 90,000 deaths in 2014.

For contrast, the number of deaths from heroin and prescription painkiller overdoses combined was only 28,647, so alcohol by itself--not mixed with cars, guns, ladders, wood chippers, or other accessories--is deadlier, easier to get, and legal.

The WaPo also points out this frightening statistic, which perhaps indicates who's likeliest to die from alcohol: "30 percent of American adults don't drink at all. Another 30 percent consumes, on average, less than one drink per week. On the other hand, the top 10 percent of American adults -- 24 million of them -- consume an average of 74 drinks per week, or a little more than 10 drinks per day."

This Week in Most Unexpected Sentences

Some stories you expect to see in the news. Others just take you by surprise, like this one: "Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage has agreed to turn over a rare stolen dinosaur skull he bought for $US276,000 ($382,000) to US authorities so it can be returned to Mongolia."

This Week in Spoilers

We admit that we don't understand the furor over movie (or other) spoilers. With very rare exceptions, it's not a particular surprise or twist in a story that makes or breaks it, for us--it's how the work is executed. That's why we can rewatch favorite movies or read favorite books, or watch movies based on favorite books. That's why binge-watching favorite TV shows is fun. One can still enjoy a work, even knowing what's going to happen. Sometimes the knowing makes the experience even better.  

We know that some disagree; however, we think this is taking things just a little too far: "A Montana man is charged with threatening to shoot a boy for sharing information about a subplot of the new "Star Wars" movie during an online conversation."

This Week in Bears

Deadspin, which is the world's greatest website if only because it names a Bear of the Year, has chosen 2015's Bear of the Year: Extra-Cool Polar Bear.

Winnie the Pooh was based on a real bear, not a stuffed bear--from the good old days, when you could buy a bear cub and take it with you on trains and ships.

Yes, we know pandas aren't really bears. Close enough, when they're as cute as this cub at the San Diego Zoo.

 

Don't forget to follow TWiA on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ThisWeekAmerica, and if you feel like tossing fifteen or twenty cents into the hat, you can do it here: paypal.me/ThisWeekinAmerica.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 52) Let's Live Like #Americans

As we've mentioned a few times now, our new Twitter account is https://twitter.com/ThisWeekAmerica. On Tuesday night, we did some live-Tweeting during the Republican debate.

We also have a new twist. If you like TWiA, you can toss us a few nickels at paypal.me/ThisWeekinAmerica. Obviously you don't have to--TWiA is free, always has been, always will be. No advertising, either. But if you're so moved, you can help defray our costs and time. And thanks for reading, whether you pitch in or not.

This Week in the Debate

The Republican candidates held their last debate of 2015 this week. Or we should say, last debates, since there are still so many candidates that they still needed to use the two-debate formula: the "kiddie table" debate and the "real" debate. Note that these nomenclatures don't say anything about the qualifications of the candidates to be president, only about their popularity in current polling.

Which raises an interesting question--why was Sen. Rand Paul on the "real" debate stage?

The answer appears to be that CNN broke its own carefully formulated rule for inclusion, and then didn't tell its viewers it had done so. Instead, it just pretended its rules had always been different than they really were. If the polls CNN had declared valid from the outset had all been counted, Paul would have been off the main stage and relegated to the kiddie table. But at the last minute, CNN decided to count a Fox "News" poll and drop a CNN poll--one of their own--so they could keep him in prime time. Even then, Paul only had a 3.7% average, which had to be rounded up to 4% for him to be included--but CNN had specifically stated that "Poll averages will not be rounded up or down to the nearest whole number." So they switched polls and broke their own rule.

Why? You'd have to ask CNN. Paul's campaign has been awful. He and Jeb! Bush have proven one thing this year--neither is suited to the national spotlight. The fact that either is still running at all can only be attributed the fact that no votes have yet been cast, and to everybody's assumption that the Republican convention might be a contested one--their first since 1976. If that happens, all bets are off. And until Iowa and New Hampshire have voted, candidates have only polls to go on. Once the voting begins, candidates will start dropping out. But a stubborn few might stay in, if they can afford to, in hopes that a deadlocked convention will give them one last shot. If nothing else, anyone who goes into the convention holding any delegates will have a say on issues like the party platform.

* * *

If CNN's debate organizers had a sense of drama--or a sense of humor--they would have arranged the podiums of Paul and John Kasich so the bases were halfway off the stage's far edges, making the on-or-off suspense a little more authentic.

 * * *

Pre-debate, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo summed up much of what we've been feeling here at TWiA World Headquarters--that the nomination, at this point, looks like it's coming down to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio--but Rubio has not, so far, demonstrated that he's up to the job of being the Republican establishment's savior. Indeed, it would be a tightwire act of heroic proportions for a guy who's trying so hard to paint himself as anti-establishment to turn around and embrace the establishment. A skilled politician could do it, but we haven't see that Rubio has that kind of skill.

Marshall sums it up this way: "That is one of the many things that makes the current Trump-Cruz phony war so compelling. Trump is baiting Cruz into the same smackdown he's used to eat up Bush, Walker, Fiorina and others. But Cruz won't take the bait. Like two zen masters facing off in a martial arts classic or perhaps two wizards do[ing] battle in The Lord of the Rings, we have an epic confrontation between two master who have trained for decades in the arts of assholery and bullying. But their powers equally matched, it is a stand off."

Cruz has a formidable intellect--though he often pretends not to, and he works too hard to pretend he's not a Princeton Law grad who clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. He can't really pull off Texas good ol' boy, though. Still, he's run a disciplined campaign, making the right moves at the right times to emerge as the most serious threat to Trump. We don't think he can win in the general election, but if he gets the nomination, it'll be hard for right-wing diehards to once again argue that the trouble with Republican nominees is that they're not conservative enough. The real trouble is that they represent an extremist viewpoint at odds with that of most of America--and Cruz is more extreme than most.

* * *

Random notes from the debate:

Rick Santorum is still in the race? Why? We get why Huckabee's there; he needs to build up his mailing list for selling phony cancer cures and the like. But Santorum, so far as we know, doesn't run a mail-order scam business. On the other hand, we don't know that Santorum has had any other job since he lost his last Senate race--maybe running for president is his full-time, permanent gig.

And why isn't Lindsey Graham doing better? We're no fans of the Senator from South Carolina, but he is at least relatively sane compared to the rest of the pack. His insistence that banning Muslims from our shores or blaming Islam in general for terrorists is insulting to millions of Muslims and harmful to our national security is correct. But he can't get any traction at all.

Here's CNN's transcript of the kiddie table debate. And here's an annotated transcript of the main event, via the Washington Post.

Donald Trump did okay for the first part of the real debate, but eventually he let Jeb! Bush get to him. His shot at Jeb!, "I'm at 42 and you're at 3!"--meaning percentage points in the polls--was accurate, but petty and juvenile. Trump has told us over and over that winning is all that's important to him. It doesn't matter at what, or how he does it, only that he wins. So to him, poll numbers have their own inherent value, and higher poll numbers say something about him as a person. In reality, all they mean is that he's one of the most successful panderers we've seen in recent years, and he's able to channel the anger, frustration, bigotry, and hatred that much of the Republican base feels and amplify it for them.

If his supporters cared about facts or knowledge or ability, his utter cluelessness about the "nuclear triad" might unnerve them. Marco Rubio schooled him, and did it in a subtle manner, saying that the "people at home" might not know what it is. By defining it for "them," he made the point that Trump was totally lost.

By the same token, Ted Cruz--who not long ago suggested that his approach to combating ISIS would be to find out if "sand can glow in the dark"--seemingly a threat to use nuclear weapons--seems to have no idea what carpet bombing is, although he has called for it several times as his approach to ISIS (this week, anyway).

BLITZER: Would you carpet bomb Raqqa the ISIS Capital, where there are a lot of civilians?

CRUZ: You would carpet bomb where ISIS is, not a city, but the location of the troops, you use air power directed, and you have embedded special forces to direct the air power. But the object isn't to level a city, the object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.

Robert Bateman at Esquire defines carpet bombing for Sen. Cruz: "So what is carpet bombing in practical, non-military-speak? Put simply, it's the act of laying down a carpet of bombs. Usually in a rectangular pattern. Completely saturating an area with high-explosives. Everything inside the area where the 'carpet' is 'laid' is expected to die. Everything. (Interestingly, Cruz claims quite often to be a Christian.)"

Then he adds: "Today, with precision weapons, we drop bombs that go precisely where we want them. We do not drop unguided bombs indiscriminately on civilian population centers, as we have in the past. We, unlike some others, have precision weapons now. The Law of Armed Conflict is pretty clear that if precision is an option, you are not allowed to 'carpet bomb' in civilian areas. (You are not allowed to anyway, but there is a mitigating factor that deals with 'proportionality' as well. We'll leave that for another time.) ISIS, for its part, does not occupy a whole lot of conventional military-like defensive positions out in the desert either. Its operatives are embedded in the population centers, the villages, towns, and cities. Flattening entire cities to kill a few dozen or even a hundred ISIS fighters would be "disproportionate," just as it would be if we were fighting a conventional military force."

Also lost was Ben Carson, who not only complained about the time he was allotted the first time a question came to him, but then turned down a chance to weigh in on one of the night's most substantive topics, the balance between security and freedom. Having started his opening statement with a "moment of silence," and filling most of his answers with meaningless drivel shot through with medical jargon, by the time he called the NRC chair "Reince Pubis," he had already demonstrated that the country would have been better served if he'd stayed home. He had a cold, and was coughing and sniffling throughout, so he might have been more comfortable at home anyway.

Jeb! had, we thought, the most reasonable arguments, and a couple of good lines (including "You can't insult your way to the presidency," directed at Trump, and referring to Trump as the "chaos candidate"). Jeb's problems are twofold. 1) He's a terrible public speaker. Even when delivering obviously memorized lines, as in his closing statement, he loses track of where he is and stumbles over himself. 2) As indicated by his shots at Trump, he comes from a Republican Party that doesn't exist anymore. In the party of his father, you really couldn't insult your way to the presidency. Even his brother ran as a "compassionate conservative," and he saved his insults for when he thought the cameras were off and the mics cold. But the fact that Trump is still at the top of the polls offers a hint that in today's party, maybe you can insult your way at least to the nomination.

Marco Rubio is good at memorizing and delivering lines, but he took hit after hit from Cruz and Rand Paul. Paul wasn't bad, though he occasionally forgot how to speak English. Chris Christie channeled Rudy Giuliani, mostly talking about how he was a US Attorney after 9/11 (is there anyone in America who hasn't heard that story a hundred times?), trying to sound tough, and speaking directly at the camera in a way that most of the candidates can't pull off. Carly Fiorina was there, more or less, but she said nothing that will impact her standing in the race. Neither did John Kasich.

Rand Paul got in the debate's best line. It came in answer to one of Christie's "I'm tough" rants.

BLITZER: Governor Christie, if the U.S. imposed a no-fly zone over Syria and a Russian plane encroached, invaded that no-fly zone, would you be prepared to shoot down that Russian plane and risk war with Russia?

CHRISTIE: Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it. A no-fly zone means a no-fly zone, Wolf. That's what it means. See, maybe -- maybe because I'm from New Jersey, I just have this kind of plain language hangup. But I would make very clear -- I would not talk to Vladimir Putin. In fact, I would talk to Vladimir Putin a lot. But I'd say to him, "Listen, Mr. President, there's a no-fly zone in Syria; you fly in, it applies to you." And yes, we would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling that the president we have in the Oval Office is right now.

BLITZER: Senator Paul -- Senator Paul, I want you to respond to what we just heard from Governor Christie. If there was a no-fly zone, you say that potentially could lead to World War III. Why?

PAUL: Well, I think if you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate.

Mostly, the debaters tried to scare the American public into voting for them, because they're the best at killing bad guys (which none of them have ever done in real life). It was not, for the most part, an uplifting conversation. Unless your greatest desire is not to be killed by an ISIS member, it wasn't what you'd call aspirational. Nor did it touch on real issues like climate change or gun violence--both issues that are far more serious threats to real Americans. And it's really impossible to talk about jihadist threats in America without talking about guns.

Instead of guns, Cruz and Carson blamed "political correctness" for killing people. Yes, literally. Guns are cool, but political correctness--in other words, the unwillingness to use the words that Cruz and Carson want used--is deadly. Of course, what's behind their continued insistence that the president isn't sufficiently anti-ISIS because he won't call the terror threat "radical Islam" if not a form of right-wing political correctness? Or is PC only PC when a liberal is the perpetrator?

Here's where we are: Trump stays in the lead. Cruz and Rubio are the next tier, though Cruz is ahead within that tier. Jeb! stays in, at least through the first few primary states. He has the money and the name, and the Republican establishment types would still like to see him or Rubio get the nomination. But Rubio and Christie are in the same lane as Bush, and both have more energy and more heat, so it's hard to see where Bush can break out. Carson, Paul, Fiorina, Kasich, Pataki, Huckabee, Santorum, and Graham peel away after a few primaries come and go and they don't pick up any wins.

* * *

The day after the debate, Trump held a rally in a welcoming site--Mesa, AZ, one of the most conservative cities in America. Here's what it was like.

* * *

Columnist E.J. Dionne seems to be the closest thing we have these days to a national conscience. A devout Catholic, he had some choice words for the debaters:

Perhaps I am influenced by the Christmas season, but there was something genuinely appalling that candidates who so often claim to be devout Christians allocated the bulk of their time to warfare, to throwing people out of our country and to walling them off. There was almost nothing about our obligations to millions around the world who are suffering, from the very wars the candidates were so focused on and from a depth of poverty that is hard for us in rich countries to fathom.

So kudos to Carla Hernandez from Austin and to CNN for including her. Hernandez raised this matter pointedly in a video, asking: “If the Bible clearly states that we need to embrace those in need and not fear, how can we justify not accepting refugees?” The responses from Christie and even the normally compassionate Kasich were, shall we say, less than full-hearted.

I am not naive, and I am not a pacifist. But I’d ask a small favor from these candidates: Please stop saying how Christian you are unless you show at least a few signs of understanding the social obligations the word imposes.

The man has a point.

Below the fold: Rationality, voting rights under attack, gun safety, truth and consequences, terror, taxes, and--to put a smile back on your face--bears.

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 51)

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. 

Follow us on Twitter: @ThisWeekAmerica

This Week in Terror 

On Sunday night, President Obama gave a rare Oval Office address. These are reserved for occasions of great seriousness, and this was no exception (although said seriousness was flawed a little by weird staging, which had the president standing at a podium set up in front of his desk; most Oval Office addresses are delivered while sitting at the desk).

But his topic was terrorism, and his tone was solemn. The intent was to reassure the public that the effort to fight ISIS is ongoing, and that events like that in San Bernardino last week remain incredibly rare. He acknowledged the difficulty of the struggle, and said that victory would not be swift or easy. But he said we will win, and ISIS will be destroyed.

Destroying ISIS is a good idea, and everyone pretty much agrees with it. Republican candidates wasted no time in saying that the president's speech lacked specifics, that it was more of the same, and that what we really need to do is to destroy ISIS.

Saying it and doing it are two different things, though.

ISIS is an organization. In some respects, it's a state. In others, though, it's an ideology. And you don't defeat an ideology through warfare. You can defeat the political manifestations of that ideology--we defeated the Nazis in WWII--but the fascistic strain, the racism, of which the Nazis were the political embodiment are with us still, and growing stronger in some places.

To defeat an ideology is a much more complicated process. It has to be replaced, in the hearts and minds of those who hold it. Ideally, it would be replaced by a more enlightened ideology, but that's not always the case. And we don't always get to decide how it'll happen, or what will replace it. We can work to make America an example the world wants to emulate, and that'll help.

Or we can be Donald Trump and his fellow Republican candidates for president.

Trump is, of course, the worst of the lot. His policy prescription was announced in a press release: "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." He further clarified by saying that the temporary ban would extend to Muslim tourists and American Muslims who are currently anywhere out of the country (though he might be hedging on that). The only exception he would allow for sure is for current American servicemembers who are Muslim. He says it's temporary, just until we can "figure out what is going on," but what he means by that isn't clear. Since he continually says there is no vetting process whatsoever, which we know is a lie, and that the administration wants to bring in 200,000 Syrian refuges--another lie--it's a little hard to accept his word on anything else.

Some of his fellow candidates weren't much nicer to that idea than to the president's speech. But the end result is the same--all they have are talking points, not workable alternative solutions. Ted Cruz hinted at using nuclear weapons. The rest seem to think ISIS would go away if the president would only call them "Radical Islam" or talk about them with more "intensity."

The president's approach--which the Republican Party seems determined to reject--is what most experts agree is the best course of action. As the New York Times reports:

“It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim-Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.”

Mr. Obama also repeated his insistence that he would not send large numbers of ground troops to the Middle East.

“We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what groups like ISIL want.” He added: “But they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.”

Referring to ISIS thugs as "Radical Islam" and talking about banning Muslims from the US is exactly the sort of thing ISIS wants to be seeing from us. Trump couldn't be a better propagandist for them if they were paying him. Again to the NYT:

As the debate on how best to contain the Islamic State continues to rage in Western capitals, the militants themselves have made one point patently clear: They want the United States and its allies to be dragged into a ground war.

In fact, when the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.”

His reaction — ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others — points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region.

Should that invasion happen, the Islamic State not only would be able to declare its prophecy fulfilled, but could also turn the occurrence into a new recruiting drive at the very moment the terrorist group appears to be losing volunteers.

The only way to defeat ISIS on the ground in a way that doesn't fulfill their objectives is for Muslim forces from the Middle East to do the job. That means Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, and probably Syria need to get involved. The socioreligious schisms on the ground there (not to mention the chaos that is Syria) might prevent that from happening; at any rate, it won't happen soon.

In the meantime, we may suffer more ISIS-inspired attacks here. We can hope not. We can try to make it harder for homegrown radicals to get weapons. We can remain alert. And as a wise person once said, "If you want to be safe, wear seatbelts and quit smoking." Or words to that effect. We would add admonishments not to drink and drive or keep guns in your home.

What we shouldn't do is prove to the whole Muslim world that ISIS is right about us. Yet that's just what Trump and his pals doing. It's a bad idea, and it's damaging our security, according to the Pentagon. The world watches our politics, and we should try to show our best face, not our worst.

Side Note 1: Ever wonder why people join ISIS? A new study offers some answers. Interesting to note this: "Foreign fighters from places like the United States and Western Europe were far more likely to be facing some sort of identity crisis, a desire for a personal sense of recognition that ISIS provides. They were also more likely to be motivated by a rejection of Western culture. A story in the New York Times over the summer, titled 'ISIS and the Lonely Young American' details how ISIS sympathizers who are able to make contact with curious and socially isolated Westerners and then manufacture a sense of community and belonging through constant online interaction (not simply one-way messaging, as some have suggested.)"

In our extensive research into mass murderers, we've found that a shattered sense of identity is one of the primary precursors to their acts of violence. People who are comfortable with who they are simply don't take weapons into public places and try to kill strangers. (The other two common precursors are some contact with mental health professionals, and access to guns). Terrorism can be motivated by religion or politics, but most stable people can hold strong views on those matters without feeling the need to kill over them. What this indicates is that those motivations are really justifications for acts that people might be inclined to commit anyway--only in this case, there's someone egging them on, encouraging them to go for it.

Side Note 2: Who loves Trump? White supremacists, among others.

Side Note 3: Dick Cheney said of Trump's Muslim ban, "It goes against everything we stand for." We're not sure the guy who turned the United States into a nation that tortures people has the slightest idea of what we stand for.

 

"We were founded upon a belief in human dignity -- that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law."
--President Barack Obama, December 6, 2015

 

Below the fold: inequality, racism, Benghazi, Fox "News," Pope Francis on climate change, and Pedals the Walking Bear!

This Week in America (Vol. 3, Week 50) #WhitePeople, #Climate, #Guns, and More

No, before you ask, we don't know how we got to week 50 when there are still 3+ weeks to go before the year's over. As Barbie once said, "Math class is tough."

 

This Week in Math

Here's a math-related fact that shouldn't be hard to grasp: government spending on infrastructure grows the economy.

And here's why:

1) Infrastucture projects create jobs. People, right here in America, have to build or repair roads and bridges, do electrical work and plumbing and carpentry and painting in schools and public buildings, lay cable or put up Wi-Fi towers, and so on. Those jobs can't be outsourced overseas. Private companies are called upon to do the work, and their employees (and those they hire on when big jobs come in) keep most of the money. They spend that money in their communities, buying groceries, home improvements, new cars or trucks. That money helps create other jobs, and those people spend, etc. A dollar pumped into an infrastructure project goes a long way.

2) A lot of the jobs created are union jobs. Conservatives have worked hard to make "union" a bad word, but union jobs traditionally pay well, and although labor unions have been banished from much of the American working class landscape, many skilled tradesmen and women are still union members. That fact helps keep the money from infrastructure projects in the pockets of the people doing the work, instead of flowing to corporate boardrooms and offshore accounts. Union labor built the American middle class, and can help bring it back.

3) Better roads, more secure electrical grids, improved schools, faster broadband, etc., all contribute to business productivity and profitability. Wares can get to market more quickly and efficiently, and can be delivered to homes the same way. Better-educated students become more productive adults. The work put into our existing infrastructure decades ago helped America become the world's economic superpower; work put into refurbishing and updating it will help us keep that status into the future.

So it was heartening that on Sunday, Hillary Clinton announced a major infrastructure proposal--and she did it at a forum full of union workers. The Washington Post describes it this way:

Clinton’s plan proposes the creation of an infrastructure bank to leverage hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign and domestic private investment for infrastructure projects, an idea that has been supported by the Obama administration, transportation experts and both conservative and liberal economists.

The portion of the infrastructure and research investment plans that require federal spending would be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes, including the 'inversion' tactic that allows large corporations — most recently pharmaceutical giant Pfizer — to avoid U.S. taxes by moving their headquarters overseas."

Conservatives are fond of saying "government doesn't create jobs." They often say it while running for or serving in political office, which is just one kind of job government does create. There are many others, though, and most of them are good middle-class jobs. Firefighters; police officers; teachers; postal workers; employees at city, county, state, and federal offices; Border Patrol agents; the military; customs workers--these are all jobs created directly by the government. Many, many more are created through government spending, including jobs as contractors at various levels, and, yes, infrastructure jobs.

Nobody holding one of these jobs should feel that their contribution is any less valuable than someone working at a private company that does no government work. Those private companies couldn't function without the infrastructure government builds and maintains, and if there's inherent value in work, it doesn't matter whether the paycheck is from a public or private entity.

Cut taxes, conservatives say. Cut government spending. During the Obama years, they blocked one infrastructure proposal after another, in pursuit of an economic agenda that makes no practical sense. That agenda kept the recovery from being as robust as it might have been, kept wages low, and slowed economic growth.

But it served a different purpose. A political one.

The conservative movement has, for decades, sought to alienate white working-class Christian males from the rest of society. That has been their political base, and they've played to--and stoked--the fears and resentments that the group has felt as "others": women, gays, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, etc. have gained acceptance and been accorded the rights (not special rights, but human rights) that those white working-class Christian males have long taken for granted.

The humanity of all Americans is diminished when any group is denied the rights granted to others.
--Julian Bond

Conservatives have always been able to point at liberals and say "Those people are taking from you and giving to those 'others'!" Whenever a Democrat holds the White House, the rhetoric gets even more heated, as has been obvious throughout the Obama years. It's been especially pronounced because Obama is himself an "other;" hence the constant attempt to keep the focus on just how different he is, through efforts including birtherism*, suggestions that he's a Muslim, language like "food stamp president," etc.

And they've been incredibly effective, as the results of this recent poll indicate (as reported in the WaPo):

Half of white Americans — including 60 percent of the white working class — told researchers that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Latinos and 25 percent of black Americans agreed. White Americans feel put-upon and mistreated — and large shares of non-white Americans do not seem to have any knowledge of the challenges that white Americans say they face.

Of course, there are always aspects of other people's lives that we do not or cannot understand. But the sheer size of the racial/ethnic gap concerning perceived discrimination against white Americans is particularly interesting because there is very little in the way of objective evidence of this discrimination and the disadvantage that typically follows. On just about every measure of social or economic well-being, white Americans fare better than any other group.

That's true of housing and neighborhood quality and homeownership. That's true of overall health, health insurance coverage rates, quality of health care received, life expectancy and infant mortality. That's true when it comes to median household earnings, wealth (assets minus debt), retirement savings and even who has a bank account.

The article continues:

White Americans are, as a group, born healthier and live longer and get better health care, jobs, education and housing in the years in between. Yet half of white Americans believe that discrimination against them is as big a problem in their lives as it is for those of people of color. But there's just no evidence to back that up.

What does exist is ample evidence of continued-but-shrinking racial and ethnic inequality in many arenas and utter stagnation and backsliding in others. Basically, what's changed since the 1950s — outside of technological innovations such as this here Internet — is that white Americans no longer have an exclusive or almost-exclusive hold on the best housing, jobs, schools or the ballot box.

The majority of white Americans polled--57%--believe that the American way of life has changed for the worse since 1950. Among self-identified Republicans and Tea Party supporters, solid majorities believe that discrimination against whites today is as bad as discrimination against blacks.

It's not, of course. Not remotely. Whites have it better in every respect.

But they've been told for decades that they don't. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and their ilk have drummed into them the fear that their way of life is disappearing, that the "others" are coming to take it away from them. Conservative media and politicians have stressed a nonexistent "assault" on white middle-class values, up to and including motherhood and Christmas.

When wealthy Wall Street types running giant financial institutions crashed the economy, middle-whites were told not to blame them, but to blame poor people--particularly poor people of color--who were sold sub-prime mortgages and extended credit they couldn't afford. When all those mortgages were bundled up into flaming financial disaster-balls that blew up the economy and those people lost their homes, middle-class whites were told, "See? That's where the trouble was!"

It wasn't, but as the Weekly Sift put it, the white working-class's "sense of grievance has been carefully nurtured and cultivated by decades of conservative propaganda, which has diligently pointed its resentment downward at scapegoat groups like blacks, Muslims, and Hispanic immigrants, rather than upward at the wealthy bosses who profited by shipping jobs overseas."

Even as efforts to stop the calamitous collapse of jobs and turn the economy around took hold, elected Republicans did everything they could to limit the effects of those efforts. They kept the stimulus package at a bare minimum, and even then only one House Republican voted for it. They fought the auto-industry bailout. In Republican-controlled statehouses, public employment was slashed, giving us month after month of private-sector job growth counterbalanced by public-sector job losses, and public-sector unions were crushed in state after state. Proposed infrastructure spending bills never got out of Congress.

Why? Because politically, a booming economy typically helps the party that holds the White House. Our recovery from the Great Recession was allowed to help the rich get richer--Wall Street has had a fantastic ride--but its effect on the middle class has been considerably less pronounced. Those public-sector union employees were mostly white middle-class people. The people hardest hit by unemployment have been rural people, largely white. Although white workers' wages have rebounded better than those of minority workers, in most cases they haven't gone up much, if at all.

Aggrieved, economically challenged white males are the conservative movement's foot soldiers. Of course conservatives wants them to link Obama to their economic woes. If the administration's recovery efforts had been allowed to come to full fruition, Democrats would hold power for decades, as they did after FDR's efforts to end the Great Depression. 

The Weekly Sift offers a detailed look at what fascism really is, how difficult it is to define, and how the factors we've been discussing here play into it. We don't think the conservative movement meant to promote a fascist ideology, but that seems to be an unintended consequence of what they have been doing. And along comes a Donald Trump who captures that zeitgeist and whips the aggrieved into a frenzy (then verbally rewards those who act out violently on his behalf). We shouldn't be surprised, but we are anyway. Because this is America, and nobody thought it could happen here (even though it has only narrowly been avoided in the past).

To avoid it now, we have to calm the racial tension that's been stirred up over these last several years. And we have to have policies that improve the economic lot of the middle class. Policies like infrastructure projects.

What Clinton proposes is not just good for the economy, it's good for the nation as a whole. If allowed to come to pass, it can help defuse the fascistic leanings so many Americans are adopting. What will also help is for people to stop blaming "others" for political expediency, and instead to remind us that we're all in the same boat. America swims or sinks with all of us together--kicking out this group or marginalizing that one is not the answer.

Establishment Republicans are in a panic over the possibility that Trump might win the nomination, might become the figure around whom the Republican rank-and-file coalesces. That would indeed be bad for the party, and for the country. Those same establishment Republicans have benefited from the forces that made Trump's rise (or that of someone like him) inevitable, though--from the dog-whistle politics, from the wink-and-nod with which they embraced white racism (through the "Southern Strategy" and the disenfranchisement of minority voters, among other methods). They built the machine that terrifies them now. One can only hope they'll help dismantle it.

More on white grievances below the fold, along with climate change, terror, courage, con games, and corruption. And to bring you back up after all the bad news, bears.