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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Inequality
We've discussed wealth/income/opportunity inequality often in this space, because growing inequality hurts the middle class (which most Americans once belonged to), threatens the economy, and pits us against each other. The New York Times published an article this week detailing some of the ways inequality is maintained or exacerbated by the wealthiest Americans massaging tax policy to their own ends:
Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.
The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups.
The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.”
We're supposed to have an IRS that can investigate these tax dodges and loopholes, to determine which are legal and which aren't, and enforce the laws requiring each citizen to pay his or her fair share. But, as the article points out, the very wealthy also target the IRS specifically to protect that wealth:
President Obama has made fighting tax evasion by the rich a priority. In 2010, he signed legislation making it easier to identify Americans who squirreled away assets in Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands shelters.
His I.R.S. convened a Global High Wealth Industry Group, known colloquially as “the wealth squad,” to scrutinize the returns of Americans with incomes of at least $10 million a year.
But while these measures have helped the government retrieve billions, the agency’s efforts have flagged in the face of scandal, political pressure and budget cuts. Between 2010, the year before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. That has forced it to shed about 5,000 high-level enforcement positions out of about 23,000, according to the agency.
In the early days of the Tea Party, millions of Americans who believed they were Taxed Enough Already threw their support to groups claiming to represent everyday Americans. The fact was that these groups were initially funded and controlled by the wealthiest few, and the petty concerns of the middle class were not even on their radar. The NYT reports: "Groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, which are financed partly by the foundations of wealthy families and large businesses, have called for impeaching the I.R.S. commissioner. They are bolstered by deep-pocketed advocacy groups like the Club for Growth, which has aided primary challenges against Republicans who have voted in favor of higher taxes."
It doesn't take a degree in economics to understand that if the richest among us paid taxes at anywhere near the rate the rest of us do, the burden on us wouldn't have to be so high. Those middle-class people writing checks to FreedomWorks were in effect paying the organization to argue against their own financial interests and in favor of people who make more in a week than middle-class families do in a year.
As for whether the ultra-wealthy will get to continue making their own rules, that's in part up to the voters (with the caveat that the voters have to come out and vote, in every race, up and down the ticket--even in nonpresidential years):
In the heat of the presidential race, the influence of wealthy donors is being tested. At stake is the Obama administration’s 2013 tax increase on high earners — the first substantial increase in two decades — and an I.R.S. initiative to ensure that, in effect, the higher rates stick by cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy.
While Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pledged to raise taxes on these voters, virtually every Republican has advanced policies that would vastly reduce their tax bills, sometimes to as little as 10 percent of their income.
At the same time, most Republican candidates favor eliminating the inheritance tax, a move that would allow the new rich, and the old, to bequeath their fortunes intact, solidifying the wealth gap far into the future. And several have proposed a substantial reduction — or even elimination — in the already deeply discounted tax rates on investment gains, a foundation of the most lucrative tax strategies.
This piece in the New Republic is almost a counterpoint to the NYT one, describing just how people with lots of money to spend can impact elections:
There are areas of politics where a flood of money can make a huge difference: namely, virtually everything but the presidential race. Super PACs in lower-profile elections don’t have to contend with pre-drawn narratives and rigid top-of-the-ticket voting patterns. There often isn’t the same relative financial balance on each side. And money stretches much further in a House race in exurban Missouri than a presidential election in Ohio or Florida.
You can make the argument that no amount of super PAC cash delivered a greater return than the relatively modest sums plowed into state legislative races in 2010. Conservative groups outspent liberal Super PACs in those elections by 3:2, and outside spending on state elections jumped, especially on the Republican side. The resulting conservative majority from that wave election, with a gain of 675 seats, secured state redistricting and strengthened the Republican grip on Congress for ten years.
This sprang from a concerted Republican strategy to win state legislatures, mindful that this could be accomplished for a pittance. A project called REDMAP, armed with just $30 million, destroyed Democratic state legislative hopes and created a structural majority for Republicans across states and Congress.
The wealthiest Americans benefit enormously from being Americans--from having access to the financial, social, and physical infrastructures that come with being American citizens. It shouldn't be too much to ask that they pay their fair share for that benefit, and in turn benefit future generations of Americans who want their own shot at success.
This Week in Gun Safety
Since 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tasked with studying threats to human health from any source, has been effectively blocked from studying gun violence, even though that is one of the major threats to the health and lives of Americans.
New York Magazine took a look this week at why that's a problem, and what they might be able to learn if they were allowed to try. Jesse Singal writes:
This ban has stymied researchers’ ability to answer a plethora of vital questions about guns and public health. The problem is that gun violence is very, very complicated. There’s a popular idea that most instances of gun violence — both suicide and homicide — are a matter of careful deliberation and plotting. In reality, impulse plays a much larger role in these acts than most people think. As a result, the key question that determines whether a given act of violence will occur often isn’t whether someone could conceivably gain access to a gun if they had a lot of time and were willing to go to great lengths to do so, but rather whether they have easy access to one during the moment when they are at the greatest risk of doing something rash and tragic. To the extent gun violence can be summarized in a simple formula, it is: risk factors plus easy access equals tragedy. It’s a formula that applies to all but a small subset of carefully premeditated acts of gun violence.
This is where all the relevant research questions come in: For example, how can we keep people away from guns when they are at their highest risk of suicide? How can we come up with a better system of temporarily preventing dangerously angry people from acquiring them? Can we temporarily disrupt the networks through which young gang members acquire guns? These questions all have empirical answers, but finding out what those answers are requires exactly the sorts of big, ambitious research efforts the NRA has successfully blocked the government from funding.
Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the president and CEO of the Task Force for Global Help and the former head of the CDC’s gun-research efforts, told Science of Us that the CDC restriction has had a deleterious effect on researchers’ ability to understand the problem. “Because we don’t know what works, we as a country are left in a shouting match,” he said. “We get into these totally nonproductive shouting matches because nobody has the evidence ... and that’s where we stand right now.”
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Here's some information about the 27 Americans shot and killed on Christmas Day, 2015.
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Evangelical preacher Rob Schenck has had a change of heart about guns that puts him at odds with most of his evangelical brethren--but on the side of Jesus:
For one thing, our commitment to the sanctity of human life demands that we err on the side of reducing threats to human life. And our belief in the basic sinfulness of humankind should make us skeptical of the NRA’s slogan, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” The Bible indicates that we are all bad guys sometimes.
Additionally, anyone using a gun for defense must be ready to kill. Such a posture is antithetical to the term “evangelical,” which refers to the “evangel,” or gospel. The gospel begins with God’s love for every human, and calls on Christians to be more Christ-like. At no time did Jesus use deadly force. Although he once allowed his disciples to defend themselves with “a sword,” that permission came with a limitation on the number of weapons they could possess. Numerous Bible passages, such as Exodus 22:2-3, strictly limit the use of deadly force.
Unfortunately, too many evangelicals ignore this. Instead, they jump on a secular bandwagon of fear mongering, contempt and bravado to gin up support for gun rights. Evangelical Sen. Ted Cruz, who I’ve prayed with several times, has said, “You don’t get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns. You get rid of the bad guys by using our guns.” Sarah Palin, who I know and once supported, told an annual meeting of NRA members, “Nowadays, ammo is expensive. Don’t waste a bullet on a warning shot.” And Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University (one of the largest evangelical institutions in the world), called on his students to arm themselves in the wake of terrorist shootings. He joked about carrying a gun in his back pocket and made light of killing Muslims. (He later said he meant only Muslim terrorists, but his comments received lots of whoops and applause.)
To me, turning from Christian to secular sources on a paramount moral question indicates a failure in faith. The words of Cruz, Palin and Falwell seem to contradict those of Jesus Christ, who commands believers to “bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”
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Naturally, there are those who read the teachings of Jesus Christ differently. Among them is Larry Pratt, the public face of the far- (far-, far-, far-) right group Gun Owners of America. The Trace describes him as "An unimposing figure with a grandfatherly air, his policy beliefs and worldview are grounded in the laws and tenets of the Bible, which he believes should hold sway over the United States. 'The right to keep and bear arms will be important until Christ comes again, because until then, people will be sinful,' he wrote in a 1983 essay called 'Tools of Biblical Resistance.' 'Crooks will steal, and murderers will kill, and government officials will tyrannize.'"
The piece continues: "For decades, he has found common cause with white supremacists and the Christian Identity movement, speaking at their events about the need to keep the evils of government at bay with firearms. In the early ’90s, he became a key figure in the country’s burgeoning militia movement, which was sparked after federal marshals got into a shootout with an alleged neo-Nazi in Idaho’s Ruby Ridge mountains. Pratt joined leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations at an event in Colorado to discuss the standoff. According to a Rolling Stone article from the time, his appearance signaled that the “gun lobby would be at the center of a web of right-wing warriors.” The Southern Poverty Law Center considers him to be a dangerous 'extremist.'” The GOA has endorsed Ted Cruz for president, which must make it hard for the group's white supremacist and neo-Nazi followers to choose between him and Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Cruz has been making serious inroads with evangelicals, many of whom seem to agree with Pratt that Jesus Christ wants Americans to carry heat.
This Week in Predictions
It's common as the calendar flips from one year to the next to look at predictions made, to see what's come true and what hasn't. We've had our share of misses--we didn't think Donald Trump would be on top of the polls for so long, or that Scott Walker and Rick Perry would be the first Republican candidates to drop out (but we were right that folks like Rand "Crybaby" Paul and Rick "Don't Google Me" Santorum would utterly fail to have any impact on the process).
But buying gas at well under $2.00 a gallon (the national average as we write this, according to AAA, is $2.001 a gallon, but it can be had for $1.75 here in southeastern Arizona) makes us think of predictions from longer ago. Like this one from Newt Gingrich in 2012: “If you would like to have a national American energy policy, never again bow to a Saudi king and pay $2.50 a gallon, Newt Gingrich will be your candidate. If you want $10 a gallon gasoline, an anti-energy secretary, and in weakness requiring us to depend on foreigners for our energy, Barack Obama should be your candidate.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. $2.50 looks pricey from here. And we're producing so much oil, we're even going to sell it overseas.
And remember this Rush Limbaugh gem from 2012? Think Progress wrote about it a year ago:
Rush Limbaugh predicted that “the country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is re-elected.” Limbaugh was confident in his prediction: “There’s no if about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut wrenching, but it will happen.”
The economic freefall would begin, according to Limbaugh, because “California is going to declare bankruptcy” and Obama would force states like Texas to “bail them out.” California currently has a $4 billion budget surplus.
Limbaugh added, “I know mathematics, and I know economics. I know history. I know socialism, statism, Marxism, I know where it goes. I know what happens at the end of it.”
Yeah, no. Didn't happen, and isn't going to. Rush proves on a daily basis that he doesn't know mathematics, economics, or history.
Presidents don't have much control over gasoline prices, and they don't always have a lot of control over the economy. But they can make a difference. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones demonstrates Obama's success in two charts. The first compares job growth during the 8 years of the Bush administration to the 7 years (so far) of Obama's. Sure, we could suddenly have a massive recession that turns the Obama trend line down, but that's no longer as likely as it once seemed. The second shows what the two presidents had to work with. Bush had a cooperative Congress, so he was able to enact his tax cuts but still spend. During the Obama administration, government expenditures went steadily down, which makes recovery from a recession harder. Even with that disadvantage the jobs performance during the Obama administration is far better.
Electing Obama instead of McCain--whose "spending freeze" idea could well have kicked us from recession into depression--was the best possible choice. Reelecting him in 2012 helped continue and strengthen the recovery, whereas a Romney win would have meant a wrong turn. But Republicans are still trapped in the same economic mindset that got us un trouble in the first place, and we can't afford one in 2016, either.
This Week in Admiration
The Gallup Poll regularly polls Americans around this time of year to see who we admire the most.
First place among men is not a huge surprise, but the tie for second place is a little strange:
Donald Trump and Pope Francis don't have much in common, but this year the two tied as Americans' second most admired men in the world.
In a Gallup poll released on Monday, Americans named President Obama the most admired man in the world for the eighth time -- he received 17 percent of Americans' votes. Trump and Pope Francis tied for second place with 5 percent of the votes each.
Americans named Hillary Clinton the most admired woman in the world -- 13 percent of those polled chose Clinton. She has been named the most admired woman 20 times. Malala Yousafzai won second place with 5 percent of the vote, followed by a tie between Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama for third plac
This Week in Black Lives Matter
An Ohio grand jury decided there would be no charges filed against the police officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice two seconds after arriving at the park where the boy was playing with a toy gun. Black men make up 6% of the population of the United States, but 40% of the 965 people killed by police in 2015 (as of December 2014, so not counting the two black people--one with mental problems, the other a bystander accidentally shot--killed by Chicago police the day after Christmas) were black men. Three in five of those killed were black or Hispanic.
We here at TWiA World Headquarters are fans of cops. We write novels about police officers doing their jobs and saving lives, and that describes most real police officers, too. But when cops are too quick to shoot--and there is no such thing as "shooting to wound" in police training; if a cop has to shoot, it's to kill--and when minorities are killed far out of proportion to their numbers, it's a disservice to all the decent, honorable cops out there who are trying to do good work.
Research by the American Psychological Association shows that white people tend to view black males as bigger, older, and guiltier than they really are. We as a society need to make progress in this area--progress that the Black Lives Matter movement might be able to help with, by raising awareness of the problem. But police officers, who are trained to use deadly force and who sometimes face special dangers in the day-to-day course of their jobs, need special training to make sure they can counter that inherent bias.
It's worth noting that Ohio is an open carry state. If the cops had mistakenly believed that Tamir Rice was an 18-year-old white boy, they'd have had no probable cause to even stop him for carrying his gun in a park. But although Rice was 12 and his gun was a toy, he was black so he was perceived as a threat.
This Week in 2015
Dave Barry offers his customary look back at the year that was:
Are we saying that 2015 was the worst year ever? Are we saying it was worse than, for example, 1347, the year when the bubonic plague killed a large part of humanity?
Yes, we are saying that. Because at least the remainder of humanity was not exposed to a solid week in which the news media focused intensively on the question of whether a leading candidate for president of the United States had, or had not, made an explicit reference to a prominent female TV journalist’s biological lady cycle.
That actually happened in 2015, and it was not the only bad thing. This was the year when American sports fans became more excited about their fantasy sports teams — which, for the record, are imaginary — than about sports teams that actually exist. This was the year when the “selfie” epidemic, which was already horrendous, somehow got even worse. Of the 105 billion photographs taken by Americans this year, 104.9 billion consist of a grinning face looming, blimplike, in the foreground, with a tiny image of something — the Grand Canyon, the pope, a 747 crashing — peeking out in the distance behind the person’s left ear.
This was the year of the “man-bun.”
And if all that isn’t bad enough, this was the year they tricked us into thinking Glenn got killed on “The Walking Dead.”
(By the way: spoiler alert.)
Read the rest here. And we hereby solemnly pledge that during 2016, there will be no intentional photographs of man-buns in TWiA. Unless, you know, Marco Rubio or Donald Trump adopts one.
This Week in Bears
Pedals the Walking Bear has been sighted. New Jersey's bear hunt is over, so Pedals fans are relieved to know he's still out there. Happy hibernating, Pedals! See you in the spring.
TWiA isn't your only source for American bear news online (though it remains the best). Here's Fusion's wrap-up of 2015's biggest bear stories.
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.
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