This Week in America

This Week in America (Vol. 4, Week of April 25)

TWiA has been silent these past several weeks, as World Headquarters have moved north (to the turf patrolled by America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM). Life's been busy, but we'll try to get back into some kind of a regular schedule. In the meantime, there are a couple of stories in the news this week important enough to drag us out of our hiatus.

This Week in the Economy

Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times is one of America's best writers on economic issues. He can explain economics in such a way that non-economists can understand what he's talking about, which is a rare talent. No wonder President Obama chose him to have a series of long conversations about his economic legacy. Those who watch Fox "News" or listen to the nonsense spouted by some presidential candidates think our economy is still in the doldrums, but it's not. As the Brookings Institute reported this week:

"After a decade when most Americans saw their incomes decline, the latest Census Bureau income data contain very good news: A majority of U.S. households racked up healthy income gains in 2013 and 2014. The facts may not fit the narratives of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Bernie Sanders, but they do help explain why President Obama’s job approval and favorability ratings have finally passed the 50 percent mark. They also show that Hispanic households made more income progress in 2013 and 2014 than any other group, which may be one reason for their growing support for Democrats. A third surprise: households headed by Americans without high school diplomas racked up their first meaningful income gains since the 1990s, thanks to the large job gains in 2013 and 2014 and the Obamacare cash subsidies beginning in those years. "

A couple of key paragraphs from Sorkin's story illustrate the paradox:

Obama is animated by a sense that, looking at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in much better shape than the public appreciates, especially when measured against the depths of the financial crisis and the possibility — now rarely even considered — that things could have been much, much worse. Over a series of conversations in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in Florida, Obama analyzed, sometimes with startling frankness, nearly every element of his economic agenda since he came into office. His economy has certainly come further than most people recognize. The private sector has added jobs for 73 consecutive months — some 14.4 million new jobs in all — the longest period of sustained job growth on record. Unemployment, which peaked at 10 percent the year Obama took office, the highest it had been since 1983, under Ronald Reagan, is now 5 percent, lower than when Reagan left office. The budget deficit has fallen by roughly $1 trillion during his two terms. And overall U.S. economic growth has significantly outpaced that of every other advanced nation.

Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council who spent hours inside the Oval Office debating and devising the president’s economic strategy, told me, “If we were back in early 2009 — when we were coming to work every morning with clenched stomachs, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs a month and the Dow under 7,000 — and someone said that by your last year in office, unemployment would be 5 percent, the deficit would be under 3 percent, AIG would have turned a profit and we made all our money back on the banks, that would’ve been beyond anybody’s wildest expectations.”

This Week at Target

Target announced this week that in their stores, transgendered people should feel free to use whichever restroom they're most comfortable in. Which makes sense, unlike Sen. Ted Cruz's absurd flailing fearmongering about "grown men" looking for young victims in ladies' rooms. But the American Family Association--declared a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center--has called for a boycott against Target. Sounds like a good reason to shop at a Target near you.

This Week in the National Mammal

We've never had a national mammal in this country, but we will soon. It's the bison. Perfect choice (except maybe for the grizzly bear).

This Week in Bears

Speaking of bears, what happens when a bear cub tries to jump through a window, only the window's closed? You get to see what an embarrassed bear cub looks like.

This Week in America (Vol. 4, Week 14, This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land)

This Week in Land Wars

Across the West, states are trying to pass legislation allowing them to take control of federal lands within their borders. Most of these exercises in futility are either based on on or lifted verbatim from model legislation composed by the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that exists to serve the whims of its wealthy benefactors and the corporate world.

The discussion of local control of federal lands has been brewing for years, and has become more pronounced since the "Sagebrush Rebellion" of the mid-90s (funny how these things always happen when Democrats hold the White House). Recently it was elevated again by the nonsensical occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, led by sons of deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy, who is currently cooling his heels in jail awaiting trial.

Hal Herring is a writer who loves the Second Amendment and has profound concerns about the growing power of the federal government. He went to Malheur from his home in rural Montana, hoping to find some kindred spirits and be able to tell their story to the wider world. Instead, he mostly found conspiracy theorists and people suffering from a severe misunderstanding of the US Constitution. His piece was published in High Country News, where it's behind a paywall (but if you care about the American West you should be subscribing anyway.

Here's the most important part of the piece. The whole thing is worth reading, at any price, because this is an important issue that will--if we aren't careful--entirely change the meaning of what it is to be an American.

It is tempting to use the philosopher George Santayana’s quote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but it doesn’t fit here. Ammon Bundy (I did not meet him during my visit to the refuge) may or may not know the history of land use in the West, but there will be no repeating the free-grazing era of the late 19th century. Not in the fastest-growing developed nation on Earth, on a planet that will soon play host to 9 or 10 billion human beings. Nothing will be free. What the Malheur militants were asking for was almost exactly what more mainstream political leaders like Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, or the American Lands Council, now headed by Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, say they want, too. The Malheur occupation, with the incessant press coverage in its early weeks, was the soapbox for disseminating payloads of misinformation about America’s public lands, about their management, about how and why we have them. Every sound bite was delivered to further the goal of privatization.

The Bundys and the militants who followed and still support them are the agents of their own destruction. Should these adherents to the land-transfer movement ever succeed and have the public lands given or sold to the states, some version of the State of Deseret will almost certainly flourish. Such a place already exists, of course: the Deseret Ranches, owned by the Church of Latter-day Saints, 235,000 acres in Utah and 678,000 acres in Florida (2 percent of Florida’s landmass). The LDS corporation would certainly be prepared to make some very large purchases of what is now public land, but it is highly unlikely that any of the Bundy family, or any of Finicum’s many children, would be grazing their cows there. Smaller operators cannot own lands that do not put enough pounds on cows to pay property taxes. It is unlikely that any of the current crop of smallholder ranchers anywhere in the West will be able to bid against the church for productive land; or challenge families like the Wilks of  Texas, who have so far bought over 300,000 acres of austere grazing land south of the Missouri Breaks in Montana; or the Koch family, whose ranch holdings comprise about 460,000 acres (including almost a quarter-million acres in Montana); or Ted Turner, who has some 2 million acres across the U.S.; or Stan Kroenke, who two years ago purchased the 165,000-acre Broken O Ranch in Montana and has just bought the 510,000 acre W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Texas.

Buyers, in a world packed and competitive beyond the imaginations of those who set aside these unclaimed and abandoned lands as forest reserves and public grazing lands in the early 1900s, are now everywhere, planet-wide. As Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, when he was president of the American Lands Council, famously said of privatizing federal lands, “It’s like having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase.”

When that lever is pulled, and it will be, unless a majority of Americans know enough about what is at stake to oppose it, we will see the transformation of our country. Federal water rights that underpin entire agricultural economies, and that are critical to some of the last family farms and ranches in America, will be in play. Few Americans, even those in the cities of the East who know nothing about these lands, will be untouched by the transformation. Once the precedent for divesting federal lands is well set, the Eastern public lands, most of them far more valuable than those in the West, will go on the international auction block. The unique American experiment in balancing the public freedom and good with private interests will be forever shattered, while a new kind of inequality soars, not just inequality of economics and economic opportunity, but of life experience, the chance to experience liberty itself. The understanding that we all share something valuable in common — the vast American landscape, yawning to all horizons and breathtakingly beautiful — will be further broken. These linked notions of liberty and unity and the commons have been obstacles to would-be American oligarchs and plutocrats from the very founding of our nation, which is why they have been systematically attacked since the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

Should this not seem like an important enough issue, ask yourself this--if Florida's beachfront was all up for sale (or what passes for beachfront after sea level rise)--how much of it would Donald Trump buy? Do you want to catch rays on Trump Beach? And pay him for the privilege?

Side Note: The occupiers left a huge mess at the refuge. The total clean-up costs are still mounting, but we've heard figures between $4 and $5.7 million. Patriotism in action.

This Week in the Vote

The disastrous polling place decision in Maricopa County, AZ's primaries continues to reverberate throughout the political world. In most of the state, there was one polling place for every 2,500 voters. In Maricopa, there was one for every 21,000 voters. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne writes:

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, whose government does not control election management, is furious about what was visited upon his city’s residents. The day after the primary, he wrote U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch asking her to open a Justice Department investigation into the fiasco. It was not just that there weren’t enough polling places, Stanton charged. Their allocation also was “far more favorable in predominantly Anglo communities.” There were fewer voting locations in “parts of the county with higher minority populations.”

In a telephone interview, Stanton made the essential point. Long lines are bad for everyone. But they particularly hurt the least advantaged, who usually have less flexibility in their schedules than more affluent people do. It is often quite literally true that poor voters can’t afford to wait.

“If you’re a single mother with two kids, you’re not going to wait for hours, you’re going to leave that line,” Stanton said. As a result, Stanton said, “tens of thousands of people were deprived of the right to vote.”

A Democrat, Stanton asked himself the obvious question: “Am I suggesting this was the intent of the people who run elections in Maricopa County?” His answer: “In voting rights terms, it doesn’t matter.” What matters, he said, is whether changes in practice “had a disparate impact on minority communities,” which they clearly did.

We can thank the conservative Supreme Court for allowing this, and for allowing multiple other states that have changed their election laws to make voting more difficult, by tearing out the teeth of the Voting Rights Act's preclearance provision. And we can look toward November, and a hotly contested presidential election, with dread of what's to come at the polls. How can any victor have nationwide acceptance if the process itself has become so broken?

Side Note 1: Arizona's Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a bill this week that makes it easier for "dark money" to be spent on AZ elections without disclosing the donors. Ducey's successful campaign relied heavily on dark money groups--now he's tossed them a nice bone in return for their help.

Side Note: Wisconsin votes on April 5. The state's Republican legislature passed a restrictive voter ID law, claiming that it wouldn't be a problem because of a planned public-service campaign that would educate voters in the new rules. The legislature then declined to ever provide funding for said campaign, so it hasn't happened. A non-partisan agency that was supposed to create voter-education material was disbanded and replaced by partisan agencies controlled by Gov. Scott Walker. Expect a genuine display of intentional vote suppression, and a mess at the polls.

This Week in the Lie of the Week

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R/UT) penned an op-ed for the New York Times this week, arguing that potential future presidential election voters deserve more of a say in the replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia than actual voters in the last two presidential elections. He buttresses his argument with a glaringly dishonest statement that discredits every word that follows. Hatch begins (emphasis ours): "JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA was among the greatest jurists in our nation’s history. Following an era of unchecked judicial activism, he became a model of careful jurisprudence, reinvigorating an originalist interpretation of the Constitution for a new generation. Justice Scalia’s approach was grounded in the words of legal texts, and not in a judge’s personal preferences or the vagaries of popular political beliefs."

Let's unpack just a little. Hatch starts out with a highly questionable assumption--that Scalia was one of the greatest jurists in history. That's a matter of opinion, and Hatch may well hold that opinion, but that doesn't make it fact. Scholars will ultimately make that call, and a couple of months from Scalia's death is probably a little too soon, but from our point of view, it's nonsense. And the reason that it's nonsense lies in Hatch's next sentence--in the big lie.

Scalia claimed to be an originalist, but the truth was that he took great pains sometimes to twist the original intent and meaning of the Founders to fit his own political views. His majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller is a case in point--to uphold nearly (but not totally) unrestricted private gun ownership, Scalia had to pretend the first section of the Second Amendment didn't exist. He dispensed with it in the first few paragraphs of his opinion, by literally rewriting it and then accepting his rewrite as the truth: "The Second Amendment is naturally divided into two parts: its prefatory clause and its operative clause. The former does not limit the latter grammatically, but rather announces a purpose. The Amendment could be rephrased, 'Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.'"

That rewrite doesn't even significantly change the meaning, but it's enough for Scalia. From that point on, his opinion is divorced from the Founders' clear intention that the people were free to keep and bear arms in order to make up a well regulated militia. We would never say that Scalia wasn't a good (and often creative) writer, but we would argue that in this case, and in many others, he reversed centuries of legal understanding and previous interpretation to say that individual gun ownership was a protected right, even in the absence of any official militia function.

And that brings us to the larger lie. Scalia was a favorite justice of the far right, not because of his originalism or his lack of personal preferences, but precisely because his personal preferences echoed theirs. He was outspoken off the Court as well as on, and never made any secret of his extremist views. And in case after case, he turned common sense and judicial precedent on its head in order to make the result match his political views (and those of his most outspoken supporters). This is apparent not only in the Heller case, but in his decision to install George W. Bush in the White House, despite the obvious conflict of interest created by having two children employed by law firms working for the Bush campaign (and once again having to tie judicial precedent in knots to reach the desired conclusion); in the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to make it easier for states with a history of discrimination to return to that glorious practice, and in the Citizens United decision, which was a blow against campaign finance reform. And many others. Almost any time the choice was between a decision that would be applauded by conservatives and one that liberals would approve of, Scalia came down on the conservative side. There are many things that can be said for him, but "nonpartisan" is never an adjective that would apply. If Sen. Hatch thinks people will believe it does, then he thinks his readers are fools, and he's happy to tell them blatant lies.

 This Week in 2016

When Ohio governor John Kasich (R) entered the presidential race, our immediate reaction was that he was running for vice president. Nothing he's done since has changed that view much; the only difference now is that we believe he's running to be Donald Trump's vice president.

Here are two viewpoints on Kasich's presence in the race, both of which take as a given that Trump needs to be stopped from winning the nomination outright. They disagree on whether Kasich helps or hurts that effort by staying in. Both make some valid points, but both assume that the only way to stop Trump in the long run is at a contested convention.

What neither seems to recognize is that Kasich might not actually want a contested convention--or that, if he does, he wants Trump to prevail anyway. It's undeniably true that if he had left the race earlier, Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) Cruz would have more delegates than he does. Each time Kasich peels delegates away from Cruz, he's helping Trump expand his lead. It's valid to argue that in Pennsylvania, where Kasich was born, and some other more moderate states, Kasich could do better than Cruz (but probably not better than Trump), so in that sense, he'll be contributing to the block-Trump factor. But in the many states that have already voted, his presence has helped Trump.

On the debate stage, Kasich's criticism of Trump has ranged from muted to nonexistent. On the trail, likewise. He points out policy differences he has with Trump, and he disparage's the tone of Trump's campaign, but he hasn't forcefully gone after Trump on a personal level. And Trump, who counterattacks whenever he's stung, has left Kasich alone. Is that just because Kasich is a nice guy? Unlikely; he's been a professional politician for decades, and he has a reputation as a guy who plays hardball with the best of them. But not against Trump. So is it a deliberate calculation, with both candidates being careful not to say anything that can't be taken back if they decide to join forces?

What does Kasich bring to the ticket? For starters, Ohio, the only state he's won so far. Democrats can win the White House without Ohio, but Republicans can't. Kasich's still pretty popular there, and his presence on the ticket could help swing Ohio to Trump in the general election.

Then there's the matter of temperament. Kasich has been campaigning as the "only adult in the room," and seemingly running for pastor-in-chief at times. Can anyone deny that to have a chance, Trump will need a recognized adult on his ticket? And given his lifestyle, that a lot of Republicans who vote on social issues would feel more comfortable with the genuinely devout Kasich on board?

Kasich and Trump are largely simpatico on a wide range of issues. Kasich is less likely to be hostile to immigrants than Trump, and he has approved Medicaid expansion in his state, while Trump wants to repeal and replace Obamacare. But his replacement plan is vague--he would allow insurers to sell policies across state lines. That's as detailed as he's been. It's such a simplistic plan (and such a terrible one) that it doesn't look like an issue he's that concerned with. Would anybody be surprised if he changed his mind later on, and decided Medicaid expansion was okay after all?

We don't know that there have been conversations between the candidates--but we don't know that there haven't. All we know is what we see, and what we see is that Kasich is trying to gain control of some delegates. Since he has no shot at victory, maybe he wants them in case they're enough to bridge Trump's gap, so that a unity ticket would reach the 1273 threshold required for nomination.

Stay tuned. And if it happens, remember you heard it here first.

Side Note 1: Speaking of Trump, here's why his trade war could kill millions of American jobs and send us back into recession within a year--and increase immigration from Mexico, to boot. Keeping him far away from the White House is critically important.

Side Note 2: This piece by Patricia Lockwood is the best article ever written about Trump rallies. Read it. A sample:

"I had touched down in Manchester a few hours before, just as darkness began to fall together with snow. I entered the Verizon Wireless Arena, a 10,000-seat venue, to see a jumbotron projecting a photograph of Melania Trump in a bikini embracing a blow-up doll of Shamu. A hallucination? It was no longer possible to tell. The great crush around me seemed to be made up of two kinds of people: Trump supporters, and people there to goggle at Trump supporters. I flowed between both, listening. The second kind loved concession snacks. The first loved snacks and also hated Muslims."

Side Note 3: Governor Scott Walker (R/WI) was the first of 17 to leave the presidential race last year, getting out well before there were primary elections to lose. But he hasn't given up hopes of being drafted onto the ticket in a contested convention. So even though when he got out, he said it was so the anti-Trump vote could be consolidated (a strategy that might have worked if 14 or 15 others got out at the same time), now he's declining to criticize Trump in public, even though he tepidly endorsed Ted Cruz. (The truth about his escape from the race is a little more pragmatic--he had no money, and his longtime benefactors, the Koch brothers, weren't ponying up for him. His campaign is still deeply in debt, though it didn't last very long or achieve much of anything.) Consider him another possible Trump VP choice. though less likely than Kasich.

Side Note 4: Marco Rubio, who also wants to remain relevant at the convention, wants to retain the 171 delegates (less 5 that Cruz already sniped) and any additional ones he might happen to get even though he's no longer running, to give him some leverage in Cleveland.

Side Note 5: Would a President Trump destroy the country, or just the Republican Party? Some smart analysis here.

This Year in Bears

Last week, we got to watch Tian Tian having a wonderful bubble bath at the National Zoo. This week, there's a baby panda (presumably someplace in China) who doesn't want to take a bath at all. Anyone with toddlers might recognize the struggle.

Here's a roundup of baby animal live cams from all over the place. In addition to bears (the babies won't be out until July but until then you can watch recorded footage, we have enguins, sharks, puppies, cockroaches, kittens, eaglets, and more. Enjoy!