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.
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This Week in Fake News
The "fake news" phenomenon has racked up a lot of press this year, because of its prominence in and impact on the presidential election. But it's nothing new. In this piece for The Trace, Adam Weinstein discusses the long tradition within the NRA of working to discredit traditional media and replace it with often completely false "news" stories of its own. Weinstein writes:
Take a moment to think about that. Of course you wouldn’t take an arrogant, unethical, biased, politically conniving source at its word. You wouldn’t ever trust it, even if it were telling the truth. You might even make a ritual, with like-minded individuals, of trashing that source’s content, of reaffirming your rightness and the media’s wrongness. You might be possessed by what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid tendency,” confronted by a media whose interests “are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable” with your own, “and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.”
Rather than critically evaluating articles for their correspondence to known facts, the NRA has long encouraged its audience to dismiss these reports and the outlets that produce them as irredeemably opposed to a cherished way of life. In the NRA’s view, the mainstream media not only fails to reveal the truth, its editors, reporters, and producers are inherently incapable of being honest about gun issues.
Why bash the press? Because it is a strategy that works. Many of the NRA’s members are primed to trade in “fake news” precisely because of the epistemological groundwork the lobby has laid. The price of admission in this pro-gun bubble is no longer merely firearms ownership or enthusiasm for shooting sports. The NRA is speaking to any real American concerned about the intentions of those cold, timid souls in the media who just don’t get gun people, much less bother to know the difference between full-auto and semi.
Growing up as one of those gun people, I saw everything that outsiders got wrong about us. But any stroll through the table literature at the Saturday gun show laid bare how much we got laughably, conspiratorially, troublingly wrong about the world outside our bubble. The gun lobby did more than just impugn the mainstream media, it created its own new media channels and other alternative “news” sites as a corrective. In short, the NRA effectively helped establish the byways and highways on which today’s “fake news” travels.
The NRA didn't invent fake news, either, of course. In the Hofstadter essay Weinstein cites, 1964's essential-reading "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Richard Hofstadter warns that the right is already engaged in such practices. Newspapers in the early days of America used to print whatever they wanted and were explicitly partisan; it wasn't until the mid-19th century that the press even started thinking about things like reporting "objective fact," largely inspired by the wire service Associated Press (AP), which wanted to be able to sell its work to a wide variety of newspapers and understood that partisan reporting would limit its clientele. Later, as newspapers became more dependent upon advertising dollars, they voluntarily tacked toward a nonpartisan middle ground.
But there have always been outliers, and in today's media environment, where anyone with enough nickels to rub together to get a blog or a website, there are few rules and no universally imposed standards. TWiA makes no pretense of nonpartisanship, but we do make an effort to collect information from a huge variety of sources and never to publish anything we know to be false. We can't say the same for the NRA, or Fox "News," or obvious propaganda outlets like Breitbart, Drudge, Limbaugh, and Jones.
Side Note: Speaking of Alex Jones, Mother Jones (no relation, we presume) has published a rundown of violent attacks committed by people inspired by Jones, either through his Infowars efforts or by movies he's produced. It results in a disturbingly large list of victims, including friend of TWiA (and former Congresswoman) Gabrielle Giffords, and runs up to this month's "Pizzagate" gunman.
This Week in the Bill of Rights
This week marks the 225th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Some pro-gun death advocates claim that the Second Amendment comes second because the Constitution's authors considered it that important. Contemporary scholarship tells a different story--the amendments were tacked on over the objections of James Madison, who wanted them incorporated into the main text rather than attached at the end. Their placement in the Bill of Rights is strictly determined by where they fell in Madison's draft. Based on its placement, what we know as the Second Amendment had to do with Congress's war powers, not with the protection of people and property.
That alone puts the lie to SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia's highly flawed legal reasoning in District of Columbia v. Heller. In his majority opinion, Scalia threw away all Supreme Court precedent, which had always held that the first phrase in the amendment: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." was just as important to its meaning as "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Scalia decided on the basis of ideology rather than facts or research (which was his SOP when crafting opinions--he was a clever writer but his extremism clouded his judgment) that the first section meant nothing, and only the last part mattered. The Founders would not have felt that way.
DC v. Heller is the decision that opened up the floodgates of the gun violence we see today, making it much harder to restrict the flow of deadly firearms than it should be (although even Scalia's absurd conclusion didn't say that private gun ownership could never be controlled--it said there could be reasonable restrictions on certain types of firearms, and restrictions on where guns could be carried). America's pro-gun death forces have taken the most radical interpretation of what was already a very radical decision to claim that essentially anyone should be able to own any gun and take it anywhere. That's not what Heller says, and even what Heller does say is a far cry from what the Constitution intended.
Below the fold: The economy, the Unified Theory of Trump, morally repugnant philosophy, power grabs, and oil pipelines. And, oh yeah, bears.
This Week in the Economy
Republicans have spent the last 8 years--even as we were suffering from and trying to recover from the worst recession since the Great Depression--arguing that there's no place for economic stimulus. We here at TWiA have spent the last 8 years arguing that Keynesian economics is sound, and a recession is exactly when you do need economic stimulus.
Well, now we're no longer in a recession. We're at close to full employment and wages are rising.
So--at just the wrong time--Republicans are starting to talk about economic stimulus. It's almost like they don't understand simple economics--or they're deliberately ignorant for ideological purposes.
At the Washington Post, economics writer Steven Pearlstein--who does understand (and teaches) economics, writes:
I will be the first to acknowledge that this is a fine time to ramp up spending on infrastructure, given how much public disinvestment and deferred maintenance there has been, and given how cheap it still is for the government to borrow money to pay for it. But there is a real danger that if we try to build too much too fast, a good chunk of the money will be frittered away on construction cost inflation, particularly if the Trump administration makes good on its pledge to deport the very people who are willing and able to do the work. At this point in the economic expansion, the justification for infrastructure investment is not to provide short-term stimulus, but rather because the investments will make the economy more productive in the long term.
There is also no convincing case for tax cuts, despite the bipartisan enthusiasm for them Federal tax burdens have been declining for more than 30 years, and remain well below those in other advanced economies. Certainly the rich don’t need a tax break—they’ve been raking it in big time for decades. Nor, for that matter, does the middle class. Many middle-class households don’t pay much in the way of income taxes, and those that do would prefer to see the money used to provide universal pre-K or free college tuitions for their kids, or better infrastructure to speed their daily commutes or bigger Social Security checks when they retire. As for the poor, since they don’t pay income taxes, they won’t benefit from tax cuts unless Republicans develop a sudden itch to increase and expand the earned income tax credit.
Elected Republicans spent the Obama administration resisting all efforts to help create jobs, to help Americans struggling with unemployment and the social ills it causes--in other words, intentionally extending the misery of our fellow Americans, because they wanted to deny Obama an economic success story.
Obama got that success story despite their efforts at obstruction--albeit too slowly for many Americans. The elevated rates of suicide and drug abuse in many working class communities throughout the country isn't just from the loss of manufacturing and extraction jobs--it's from the inability of people to find any work, even though Obama was pushing investments in infrastructure and job training and job creation that would have helped them. Now, desperate after 8 long years, many of them have voted for the Republican for president, which is, after all, what those elected Republicans were trying to accomplish. As a political strategy, it was successful. As a moral one, it was a spectacular failure.
It's unfortunate that so many Americans had to suffer needlessly for so long. And unfortunate that the result of that suffering is the election of a president who'll do his best to usher in a new gilded age, who has already forgotten those Americans exist except as nameless, faceless voters.
We're glad to see Republicans, at long last, accept the reality that Keynesian economic stimulus works. We hope they'll remember it the next time there's actually the kind of crisis where it's the proper response. And we'd dearly love to see Americans who voted for these despicable charlatans, who deliberately made our friends and neighbors suffer for partisan advantage, hold them to account.
This Week in the Transition
We didn't have much time to do research this week, and frankly, we're a little exhausted by trying to keep up with the outrages of the Trump transition. Instead of running down what's wrong with each and every person Trump has appointed or nominated to the posts that will determine the fate of America over the next four years, we'll instead offer a Unified Theory of Trump that explains why he's making these terrible choices.
Two aspects of Trump's character define pretty much everything you need to know about him (and those two are really just different sides of the same coin): He sees every relationship as being transactional, and he sees every relationship in terms of dominance.
In other words, everything is a deal, a negotiation. And in every negotiation, he must win. This explains his business practices. It explains his "reality" show, in which he picked "winners" and "losers" (show staffers have revealed that the people he "fired" weren't necessarily those who'd done a bad job at the tasks assigned them; that the show had to edit footage to make it look as if they had once Trump had decided he would fire them).
And it explains his staffing choices thusly: He's putting people in important positions not because they're qualified for those posts, or even capable of leading the bureaucracies they'll be responsible for. He's picking people who are rich, because in his world view, that makes them winners. He's picking people who despise the agencies they'll head (like Rick Perry at Energy, a department he announced in 2012 that he wanted to eliminate, except that he couldn't remember it when he was listing those; like Betsy DeVos at Education, when there's no evidence that she's ever set foot in a public school and has made clear her contempt for the very idea; like Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, when he's a notorious climate change denier who constantly sues the EPA over its attempts to, you know, protect the environment. The list goes on.) because doing so proves his dominance over the political norms that suggest people should have some expertise over the departments they'll run.
Exxon Mobil chief Rex Tillerson is perfect for Secretary of State, in his view, not because he puts America's interests first--he never has (but then, neither has Trump)--but because he's rich and has made big deals, which are traits Trump values. He picked Ronna Romney McDaniel to head the RNC not because she's especially experienced in that regard, but because it's one more way to humiliate her Uncle Mitt (who was publicly considered, and rejected, as Secretary of State in order to make his humiliation into front-page news).
Everything is a deal, and in every deal there's only one "winner," which in Trump's world means "the one who shows dominance over others." Those are the driving facets of Trump's personality, and when you look at his horrific staffing decisions through that lens, they make perfect sense.
This Week in the Obama Presidency
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of America's most skilled and perceptive writers (which is what makes his take on Marvel Comics' Black Panther so good). But he's even better when he's exploring America from a nonfiction perspective, particularly through the lens of our racial history and present. Here's his long, gripping, insightful piece on President Obama, from someone with unique access and a unique viewpoint. It's brilliant work, and worth a few minutes of your time.
This Week in Rand
The Washington Post did a rundown this week on all the worshippers of the morally repugnant Ayn Rand with whom Donald Trump (also a Randian, except we assume he's only read the Cliff's Notes) is filling his cabinet. Rand believed that selfishness was the only worthwhile virtue, that rape was okay, that Native Americans were ignorant savages with no claim to the land they occupied, and that people with lots of money were necessarily superior to people without--all of which made her a role model to a certain type of libertarian conservative.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver took a look at Rand's philosophy and those who try to model their lives on her ideas. No one who believes that Rand makes the slightest amount of sense should be in a position where they can foist that reprehensible philosophy on society. Here at TWiA World Headquarters, expressing approval of Rand is an automatic disqualifier for elective office.
This Week in #NoDAPL
The Dakota Access pipeline was rerouted through the sources of water for the Standing Rock Sioux because the predominantly white population of Bismarck, ND, objected to its potential for contaminating their drinking water. The Natives at Standing Rock pointed out, correctly, that they are also human beings, and entitled to clean water. The pipeline-pushers disagreed. This week, 150 miles away from the campground where the protestors made their stand, another oil pipeline spilled 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a creek. There is no such thing as a rupture-proof oil pipeline (or any other completely safe method of transporting oil).
And that doesn't even get to the problem of what the oil does to the world when it's used. The only safe place for oil is in the ground.
Side Note: Speaking of extraction, The Nation wonders how much of America's public lands we'll lose to development during the Trump administration. It's a fair question.
This Week in Aleppo
We ordinarily confine TWiA to events here at home (hence the iA). But the heartbreaking stories from Aleppo need to be heard far and wide. It should be remembered that the Syrian government is accomplishing this wholesale violence with help and support from the same Russians the incoming Trump administration is so friendly with.
Inside the last pockets of rebel territory in eastern Aleppo, most residents sheltered in their houses Monday as bombs rained down and government troops came closer. The area has been shattered, and monitoring groups say hundreds have been killed there in the latest offensive.
Residents said Monday that roads in the rebel-held districts were filled with civilians camped out and huddling in the winter cold.
“Life in Aleppo has become a slow death,” Shaer said. “You watch everything and everyone dear to you disappear.”
And on Monday night, the phones of most civilians contacted by The Washington Post appeared to have fallen silent. Their fate remains unknown.
This Week in Shameless
Oh, North Carolina, what are we going to do with you?
Republican governor Pat McCrory was defeated in November by Democrat Roy Cooper. Despite losing his reelection bid, McCrory hung on for a month, calling for recounts that only ever increased the size of Cooper's lead. Finally, McCrory accepted reality and conceded.
North Carolina's Republican legislative supermajority, however, did not. This week, they called a special session to consider a pair of bills that would place extreme restrictions on Cooper's ability to do his job. As of this writing, McCrory has signed one of these plainly ridiculous bills. The Raleigh News and Observer describes SB4, the first one signed:
The bill would make the governor’s Cabinet appointments subject to approval by the state Senate and cut his ability to appoint members to UNC schools’ boards of trustees.
Another provision would cut the number of employees who serve at the governor’s pleasure from 1,500 to 300, reversing an expansion that legislators approved for Republican Gov. Pat McCrory at the start of his term. It would prevent the governor from having any such employees in the state’s budget office and human resources office.
It also merges various departments to make a new one overseeing North Carolina elections. The newspaper writes:
SB 4 would replace the current State Board of Elections with the current eight-member State Ethics Commission. The new board would assume lobbying regulation duties from the Secretary of State. It would be run by the current director of the state elections office, Kim Strach, until a new board is seated in July and choses a director.
The current state Board of Elections has five members, three of whom are Republican. The Ethics Commission has seven members, four of whom are Republican.
The five members of the state Board of Elections are appointed by the governor from a list of nominees submitted by Republican and Democratic parties. No more than three can be from the same party, which gives the incumbent party an advantage.
Three-member county boards are chosen by the state board with no more than two from the same party.
The bill would make the state board an eight-member board, with four appointments by the governor and four by the legislature. It would create four-member county boards also evenly divided between the two major parties.
The chair of the new board would alternate between parties every year.
What the paper leaves out is that the board would be chaired by Republicans in every even-numbered year and Democrats in odd-numbered years. National elections, of course, are held only in even-numbered years.
The point of these bills is obvious: to cement Republican control of the state, despite the fact that the voters chose a Democratic governor. It is, in other words, a shameless attempt to undo the will of the voters, to reject small-d democracy to maintain partisan advantage. This shouldn't be surprising, in a state that has already tried to restrict the votes of minority voters (and been called out by the courts for so blatantly pursuing that goal); nor should it be surprising when Republicans across the nation support racist voter suppression efforts, and line up to fawn over the most unprincipled and frankly dangerous president-elect in American history. As a party, they've given up any moral high ground; now they exist purely to win power, and they win power purely to serve the interests of the wealthy.
Still, this power grab is somewhat more blatant than much of what we've seen before. Don't be surprised to see Republicans in other states follow suit, if North Carolina gets away with it.
This Week in Bears
Happy birthday to Coldilocks, America's oldest polar bear, who turned 36 on Friday!
A West Virginia man (with some of the craziest hair you've ever seen) adopted an orphaned bear cub at his private animal sanctuary, and within two days, is able to feed the bear from his hand and from his own mouth. Bears are obviously sweet and docile.
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