Robert.mccowen

The New York Times surveyed 7,000 college freshmen on their knowledge of history and geography. They did not know that much:

The students have but a faint idea of the geographical formation of this country. They place Portland, Ore on the Mississippi River, and St. Louis on the Atlantic Ocean.

Their history knowledge was no better, as educators lamented in the article: “Why are names such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Jackson, [and] Hamilton almost unknown?”

Clearly, the Times intoned, the educational system was in crisis and Things Needed To Be Done. Congressional hearings! Subcommittees! More standardized tests! Answering the most important question of all: “What do students learn in school, anyhow?”

Given the existential threat threatening the United States, how, the Times said, could we not ensure our students were well-educated?

It is felt at this time, with the United States fighting for the right to continue its democratic way of life, the youth of the land should know the origin and background that have made this nation what it is today…One conclusion is obvious: the study of United States history in our schools can no longer be neglected.

The article date was April 11, 1943. America was in the middle of World War II, and, as Tom Brokaw put it:

It was a critical time in the shaping of this nation and the world, equal to the revolution of 1776 and the perils of the Civil War. Once again the American people understood the magnitude of the challenge, the importance of an unparalleled national commitment, and, most of all, the certainty that only one resolution was acceptable. The nation turned to its young to carry the heaviest burden, to fight in enemy territory and to keep the home front secure and productive. These young men and women were eager for the assignment. They understood what was required of them, and they willingly volunteered for their duty.

This is not to make fun of that generation or (especially) those soldiers, even if they may have thought they were sailing to England from St. Louis. It is, instead, to point out that Americans are particularly prone to panic about their educational system, to believe that it is failing, in decline, and about to collapse. That tendency is present now, and was present then. That doesn’t mean that our educational system can’t improve, isn’t riddled with flaws, and couldn’t use changes. But it does mean that we shouldn’t let panic substitute for analysis, and partisanship substitute for reason.

As a kid, I could fairly be called an obsessive baseball fan. Among many other useless pieces of information I could have told you Ted Williams’ lifetime batting average, home run total, number of batting titles, and other bits of arcana which were much more impressive to know in the days before Google. I owned a copy of The Science of Hitting. I learned, courtesy of Ball Four, that the main labeled by the Boston press (whose members he generally despised, and who generally returned the sentiment) employed a striking ritual when preparing to ply his craft:

In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.

He’d go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, “My name is Ted fucking Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”

He’d swing and hit a line drive.

“Jesus H. Christ himself couldn’t get me out.”

And he’d hit another.

Then he’d say, “Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his.”

Wham!

“He doesn’t really think he’s gonna get me out with that shit.”

Blam!

“I’m Ted fucking Williams!”

Sock!

When I put aside childish things, I read some classic essays about the man, including Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” and Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

Here’s what I didn’t know about Ted Williams until today: he was half-Mexican (with some Basque heritage thrown in for good measure).

It’s something that didn’t come out until a month before Ted died in 2002, the fact that he was a Mexican-American. His mother was Mexican — [she] was born in Mexico — and her parents were born and raised there as well. He was embarrassed about this and afraid that the prejudice of the day would hurt his baseball career. Even though Mexicans didn’t figure as prominently as black ball players, nevertheless he was aware of the black prejudice and feared that it could hurt him. He was advised to keep this under wraps and he did. He always spoke rather contemptuously of his extended family on his mother’s side and referred to them as “the Mexicans” in not a nice way.

There was a very telling moment in 1939 after Williams had completed his rookie year with the Red Sox and had made an absolutely smashing debut — hit well over 300 and led the league in runs batted in — and he returned to San Diego the conquering hero and was met at the train station by a gaggle of 100 or so of the extended Mexican clan. Ted took one look at them from afar and beat a hasty retreat. He didn’t want to be seen with them.

Ted Williams was one of the most famous athletes in America for 20 years, and he had to put it mildly an adversarial relationship with what used to be called “the press” and is now the media. Yet he passed with complete success; nobody outed him.

A final note: Williams’ well-known acceptance speech when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966 now becomes an even more interesting cultural moment:

Ballplayers are not born great. They’re not born great hitters or pitchers or managers, and luck isn’t the big factor. No one has come up with a substitute for hard work. I’ve never met a great player who didn’t have to work harder at learning to play ball than anything else he ever did. To me it was the greatest fun I ever had, which probably explains why today I feel both humility and pride, because God let me play the game and learn to be good at it.

The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty second home run. (Note: Williams retired with 521.) He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, “Go get ‘em, Willie.” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Ohio leads the nation in swearing.

Ohio is also the 5th least courteous state.

Personally, I blame William McKinley.

Who’ll be the first to demand the birth certificate?

President Obama has nominated Debo Adegbile, senior counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, to take over as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. The former head of that division, Thomas Perez, is now Secretary of the Department of Labor.
While Adegbile served as an attorney for the Senate Judiciary, working primarily on crafting a new Voting Rights Act bill, he’s more popularly known as the lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued on behalf of preserving the Voting Rights Act before the U.S. Supreme Court. Adegbile defended it twice before the high court, successfully helping to protect it when it was challenged in 2006, and again this past February before Chief Roberts’ court gutted the landmark civil rights bill. Adegbile also represented Hurricane Katrina evacuees in a federal voting rights lawsuit shortly after the storm.
“Our country needs someone like Debo with significant experience in voting rights to protect the deeply held American value that each person has the right to a voice in our democracy,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP LDF. “Debo has precisely the type of broad civil rights experience that is required at this pivotal moment in our country.”
Adegbile is the son of parents who immigrated to America from Ireland and Nigeria. As a child he coped with poverty and homelessness before working his way through law school by way of loans, various jobs and scholarships. He is now considered one of the premiere civil rights attorneys in America.

I spent some time reading terrible arguments — in good faith or otherwise — that Democrats will regret using the nuclear option. I explain why all the forms of this argument are transparently wrong. Of these, the strangest is liberal sentimentalism about the filibuster:

Some liberal writers whose work I respect enormously have an attachment to the idea of the filibuster that I find frankly unfathomable. For example, the eminent legal scholar Geoffrey Stone argues that the nuclear option is “a sad day for America.” But like most such arguments, his defense of the filibuster exists entirely in the abstract, with no attempt to grapple with the actual effect of the filibuster on American politics. In what is always a bad sign, Stone begins by invoking the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which makes about as much sense as invoking Henry V to argue that monarchy is preferable to democracy. More unfortunate is that Stone does not depart the realm of the Hollywood tear-jearker to consider how the filibuster has been used by the actually existing United States Senate. Stone does not identify any example of the filibuster being used to protect an oppressed minority, presumably because as far as I can tell there aren’t any. Nor does he deal with the frequent use of the filibuster to obstruct federal civil rights legislation, a much more representative use of the filibuster than Jimmy Stewart’s stand for the little guy.

The depiction of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a nearly precise inversion of how the filibuster actually works. Far from protecting the interests of powerless minorities, the filibuster in practice is far more likely to allow powerful, overrepresented minorities like segregationist and business interests to thwart legislation intended to protect oppressed minorities. The Republican blockade of Obama’s judicial and executive nominees is very much consistent with this tradition, which is why the use of the nuclear option was a clear victory for progressives.

Another example of an excellent writer with an attachment to the filibuster I find inexplicable is Johnathan Bernstein, whose defense of the practice I missed until after my article went to the editors. One of his points — “Have you actually looked at the House of Representatives lately? Do we really need a second body organized that way?” I address directly in the article. The problems with this argument are that 1)the Senate looking more functional is a historical anomaly, and 2)House dysfunction is not caused by its majoritarian structure. Indeed, if Tea Party House Republicans had an effective veto like they would in the Senate it’s not clear that the planet Earth would exist anymore. Certainly, there would be not only no debt limit extension but no ACA, no repeal of DADT, and no stimulus, among many other things.

On his larger argument, I’m not sure Wendy Davis is any more relevant to the routinized filibuster of the United State Senate than a Frank Capra film is. Reducing the filibuster to a 55-vote threshold wouldn’t reserve the filibuster for unusual, lonely and ultimately futile stands against bad legislation; it would just be a de facto 55-vote supermajority requirement that would have no good reason for existing. And, really, the fact that defenders of the filibuster are unable to come up with the filibuster serving a useful purpose in the Senate itself and have to rely on hypotheticals, other legislative bodies, or Hollywood movies makes my case for me.

I should say that Bernstein does have a good explanation for why the Republicans may have pushed too far — the few remaining moderates were being hung out to dry. I would add that the Cruz faction seems to care more about posturing than actual policy substance, so the counterproductive results from their perspective may not matter too much to them.

Richard Cohen evidently is part of a bet to see if there’s anything he can write about race that won’t get him fired:

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Gag reflex, eh? Given that one can assume Cohen thinks he holds conventional views himself, I think this makes him unusually qualified to judge whether other institutions are racist.

This is a plea from Michigan – from valued commenter HillaryRettig:

Dear Juicers,

Greetings from southwest Michigan, where the landscape is flat, the people are darned nice, and the football teams and the beer kick ass. (Plus, we just got an Alamo Drafthouse – yeah, us!)
Plus, we progressives have a GREAT candidate, Paul Clements, who’s got a real shot at winning our 6th district House seat next year, unseating the noxious Republican incumbent Fred Upton.
Like many other Repubs, Upton is a former moderate who’s recently swung hard right due to Tea Party Terror Syndrome(tm). You can judge him by his friends/donors, who include all the wrong people: Koch Industries, Halliburton, the Petroleum Marketers Association, and Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris).They love him because of his apparent willingness to do whatever foul thing they ask, be it deny climate change, severely restrict pretty much every non-rich person’s access to health care and preventative medicine, or undermine the Clean Air Act.

You can also judge Upton by his enemies, who include a vast array of unions, women’s groups, human rights groups, and environmental groups. He got “0” ratings from: CWE, AFSME, AAUW, NARAL, Middleclass.org, Alliance for Retired Americans, and Human Rights Campaign; and near-zero or failing ratings from the NEA, National Nurses United, NAACP, and the League of Environmental Voters, among many others. Upton is so, so very bad on environmental issues that the LA Times actually crowned him, “the #1 Enemy of the Planet Earth” in Congress.

Upton’s enemies also include lots of ordinary Michiganders, who are pissed because, despite his assiduous selling out, his record on bringing jobs home is dismal.
One more thing you should know is that Upton’s vulnerable. Paul’s team has run the numbers, and in a conservative-leaning district that nevertheless went decisively for Obama in 2008, this race is definitely winnable. And the Wingnuts are kindly helping us out by giving Upton a battle on his right flank.
The very worst thing about Upton is that he’s chair of the House’s powerful Energy and Commerce Committee—Henry Waxman’s old committee! As such, he’s had the opportunity to do real harm–and will continue to do harm until we get rid of him.

*Here he is, looking pretty smug and safe in that chair! Also: what’s wrong with his eye? Is that a wink?

As a child of privilege—Upton is an heir to the Whirlpool appliance fortune—who went almost directly into politics after college, and who now spends nearly all his time promoting the interests of corrupt corporations, Fred Upton embodies everything that’s wrong with the system.
Fortunately, Michigan’s got a GREAT alternative in Paul Clements. Think of him as the Luke Skywalker to Upton’s Emperor Palpatine.

* no winking at wealthy donors going on here:

Now, as an economist and professor of political science at Western Michigan University, Paul’s research specialty is—get this!—evaluating the effectiveness of social programs. In other words, he’s an expert on effectiveness and accountability—two elements sorely lacking in our current Congress.
Of course, Paul is also a super nice guy and a great progressive, who will advocate for all the right things. He recently brought environmental activist Bill McKibben to speak at WMU.
So, c’mon, Juicers: jedi up and donate to Paul’s campaign! Think how good it’s going to feel, next November, when we send “Emperor” Upton packing, and replace him with someone who cares both about people and good governance.
CONTRIBUTE TO PAUL’S CAMPAIGN HERE
Shout Out to Howie Klein at DownWithTyranny, who has also done a terrific job documenting Upton’s many malevolences.

I admire what she’s doing here because it is difficult to remove an incumbent (but so much fun to win!) so help her (and all of us) out if you can.

Greg Sargent, at the Washington Post:

With Senate Republicans blocking a third Obama nomination to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide tells me Reid is now all but certain to move to change the Senate rules by simple majority — doing away with the filibuster on executive and judicial nominations, with the exception of the Supreme Court – as early as this week…

“Reid has become personally invested in the idea that Dems have no choice other than to change the rules if the Senate is going to remain a viable and functioning institution,” the aide says. That’s a long journey from where Reid was only 10 months ago, when he agreed to a toothless filibuster reform deal out of a real reluctance to change the rules by simple majority. Asked to explain the evolution, the aide said: “It’s been a long process. But this is the only thing we can do to keep the Senate performing its basic duties.”…

Take it away, Mr. Pierce:

… It’s time, Harry. Really, it is. I was on the other side of this issue for a very long time because I didn’t want to confront the possibility of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with the unlimited power to do anything that President Scott Walker wanted. That kind of thing still gives me pause. But this business with the judges has long passed over the International Fk You Line. One of the reasons we elect presidents is because we approve en masse of that president’s philosophy toward the law. This means we elect him so that he can appoint federal judges who will be sympathetic to that philosophy to the federal bench. For going on 40 years, we have seen a long march of conservatism in the federal judiciary, especially at the appellate level, where nobody’s really paying attention until, say, Janice Rogers Brown or someone hands down a decision making thumbscrews legal if the police are acting in good faith. It is not a great stretch to argue that this president was elected (twice) at least partly to reverse the results of that long march. That he is not being allowed to fulfill that part of his mandate does not merely obviate the power of the popularly elected majority in the Senate, it obviates the stated wishes of the entire nation by obviating the power of the popularly elected president of the United States. This is mucking around with two of the three branches of the federal government in order to work your will in the third. Moreover, it hamstrings future presidents who might share that judicial philosophy by blocking the career paths of like-minded judges. And does anybody seriously believe that the Republicans will not do exactly the same thing if a seat on The Big Court comes open? Please….

As an avowed atheist, this still brought a tear to my eye:

Pope Francis saw a seriously disfigured man covered with boils, stopped his motorcade, and went and embraced the man, kissed him on the forehead while cradling him in his arms, and then prayed with him.

I still don’t believe and never will, but I think there is common ground to be found in a church that this man leads. More of this, please.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

More Farley’s beat, but this footage of air warfare from Japanese archives in 1945 is pretty amazing to watch.

Some dimwit in the marketing department at a rapacious megabank had a bright idea: Let’s think outside the box, disrupt the industry, establish new paradigms and build our brand by engaging the unwashed on social media:

It didn’t go well:

Ouch:

Oof:

Yikes:

It goes on and on like that at #AskJPM. Finally, banksters raise the white flag:

Ya think? Stupid fucks. Ha ha. The end.

(Bill Watterson via GoComics.com)
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The documentary “Dear Mr. Watterson” finally opens this weekend — the website has a list of showings, video-on-demand details, and purchase offers. (I’mma buy the DVD, because I’m old & staid.) You pretty much know whether you’ll be watching this already, but Andrew O’Hehir reviews it for Salon:

… Any “Calvin and Hobbes” fan will enjoy watching Schroeder’s film, which is more a love letter to the strip and its publicity-shy creator than anything else. “Dear Mr. Watterson” is a work of charming reportorial energy, in which Schroeder (who wrote, directed and edited the movie) interviews many prominent fans and friends of Watterson – including “Bloom County” cartoonist Berkeley Breathed and actor Seth Green – and handles original “Calvin and Hobbes” artwork now in a comics archive at Ohio State. Schroeder’s passion for the material comes through clearly, and he correctly identifies a note of ruefulness – a sort of American-Zen reflection on the ephemeral and transient nature of all experience – that runs through Calvin and Hobbes’ adventures even at their most joyful…

But Schroeder isn’t much of a comic-strip expert or historian, by his own admission, so “Dear Mr. Watterson” bounces off many of the most interesting issues in and around “Calvin and Hobbes,” noticing them but not exploring them deeply. As various of Watterson’s fellow cartoonists point out, “Calvin and Hobbes” was the last in a historical line of fanciful or allegorical newspaper comics that attracted a large popular audience while pushing at the artistic and conceptual limits of the form. This tradition goes back at least as far as Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” (which debuted in 1905) – a major formal and structural influence on Watterson — and then continues through George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” still viewed by comics devotees as the two greatest newspaper strips of all time. Like each of those three pioneers, Watterson treated the full-color, large-format Sunday comic as a zone of free-form experimentation, insisting on full editorial control.

I think that context is crucial to understanding Bill Watterson, and what he did and didn’t do. He was a struggling editorial cartoonist, nearly unknown outside northeastern Ohio (his hometown is called Chagrin Falls, which has to be one of the greatest American small-town names), when he suddenly leapt to fame with “Calvin and Hobbes,” which became an international hit within a year or two. He had the opportunity to become immensely rich off his strip and its characters – one industry expert in Schroeder’s film suggests that licensing and merchandising could have brought in $300 million or more – and refused to license anything, ever…

***********

Apart from what the Japanese call “visual culture”, what’s on the agenda today?

Earlier this week, the Republican minority in the Senate blocked the nomination of Nina Pillard. The stated reasons included her participation in the litigation of some cases that ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court. And, in fairness, her positions were so radical that they were ultimately adopted by that well-known Trotskyite Chief Justice Comrade William Rehnquist:

It’s hard to imagine evidence of “radicalism” being much more feeble. You don’t exactly have to be Catharine MacKinnon to believe that states denying women the same educational opportunities as men violates the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Indeed, Pillard’s position won at the Supreme Court 7-1. Similarly, arguing that the FMLA—which passed the Senate 71-27—was applicable against state employers is not exactly revolutionary. The Supreme Court agreed in a 6-3 opinion authored by noted left-wing fanatic William Rehnquist (who also voted with the majority in the VMI case.)

The evidence that Pillard is a radical, in other words, is that she worked to advance views about women’s constitutional rights that have won the support of one of the most conservative Supreme Court justices of the last century. To call this argument “self-refuting” is putting it mildly. And Pillard is considered the most liberal of the D.C. Circuit nominees being filibustered.

Obama is not nominating judges who are the left-wing equivalents of Janice Rogers Brown, and Republicans are still rejecting in principle his right to make any further nominations to the D.C. Circuit. It’s time to blow up the filibuster.

…Amanda has much more on the dangerous subversive Nina Pillard.

Evidently, the Women’s Health Protection Act isn’t going to pass anytime soon. But I agree that it’s another welcome sign that Democrats have decided to stop being timorous on reproductive rights:

What’s most bracing about the proposed bill is that it represents a willingness on the part of Democrats in the House and Senate to stand forcefully behind Roe, and to challenge the entrenched thinking that only conservatives are willing to organize around reproductive rights issues. It’s the very opposite of the rear-guard action we’ve been seeing for so many years: an effort to give real legal force to the fact that Roe remains the law of the land, and to craft a legal response for those who are seeing abortion rights all-but-curtailed nonetheless. Finally, it signals that Wendy Davis and the women of Texas may be onto something: Standing up for a woman’s right to choose is neither shameful nor immoral, and standing by as those rights are rolled back is simply no longer an option.

Right, and the sooner all national Democrats realize the pointlessness of chasing some imaginary group of anti-choice but not too anti-choice voters and just embrace the correct policy, the better.

Our accidental president, unfettered by office or responsibility, can now let his fundy freak flag fly:

According to a report from Sarah Posner in Mother Jones, George W. Bush is scheduled to give the keynote address at an upcoming fundraiser for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute, an organization devoted to converting Jews to Christianity in order to bring about the second coming of Christ.

Speaking as an aging Bar-Mitzvah-boy-card-carrying-atheist-Jew, I am not going to indulge in profanity, hyperbolic insult, or the ridicule and public shaming that should attend any such gob-smackingly  awesome arrogance and ignorance.  I’ll simply invite the man who is currently to be found in position one, two, or three on the Worst President Ever tables to kindly self-copulate with an oxidized farm implement.

I’ll add just this.  You can tell a great deal about someone from the company he keeps:

Bush will follow last year’s keynote speaker, Glenn Beck.

Well — one more thing.  Glenn Beck?  F**k him too.  Or rather — when the need arises, may he be attended by urologists who failed mohel class.

And (“Our weapons are…Three!) really the last one. I can’t leave this story without noting that the grift is strong on this one.  Hearing the man Charles Pierce has forever dubbed our C+ Augustus speak will set the rubes back from a C-note to $100,000.  That’s a lot of simoleons, enough so that I am inevitably reminded of my co-religionist Jesus’s almost Elizabeth-Warren-like view of the banksters.  But I suppose I just lack that necessary faith that would turn handing over that kind of cash to those kinds of people.

(PS — our weapons are 4! — how’s that “why don’t Jews vote Republican” inquiry going, guys?)

Image:  Piero della Francesca, The Torture of the Jew,  between 1452 and 1466

This Friday, 48 million people – including 21 million children – will see their food stamp benefits reduced. http://t.co/prq7ZXud2c

— BillMoyers.com (@BillMoyersHQ) October 29, 2013

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From Moyers’ link:

… Tianna Gaines-Turner recently described the impact of cuts like these in written testimony she submitted to Congressman Paul Ryan’s War on Poverty hearing: “Cutting a person’s benefits by $10, or $15, or $20 might not seem like a lot to legislators, but it would cut meals out completely for families like mine.”

Families like hers are families with two working parents earning low wages while trying to support three children. Ms. Gaines-Turner is employed by a childcare provider and her husband works the deli counter at a grocery store.

The SNAP cuts come at a time when 49 million people — about 14.5 percent of all US households — are food insecure. That means they don’t have enough money to meet their basic food needs, and don’t necessarily know where their next meal is coming from. The Institute of Medicine already demonstrated the inadequacies of the SNAP allotment for hungry families even before this cut…

… Food stamps lifted a record 4 million people above the poverty line in 2012, but benefits will be cut on Friday and both the House and Senate are deliberating further cuts in Farm Bill negotiations…

Josh Eidelson, at Salon:

Food stamp recipients face a massive benefit cut set to kick in when stimulus funds expire Friday. The nationwide cut “is equivalent to about 16 meals a month for a family of three,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis using the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan.” CBPP called the roughly $5 billion annual cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “unprecedented” in “depth and breadth.”

“If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon Monday. Purvis said that the looming cut would mean about 76 million meals “that will no longer be on the plates of the poorest families” in NYC alone – a figure that outstrips the total number of meals distributed each year by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest food bank in the country. “There will be an immediate impact,” she said.

“The fact that they’re going to lose what’s basically an entire week’s worth food” each month, said Purvis, “it’s pretty daunting.” She told Salon that while policymakers “are attempting to punish people for being poor,” and “people are comforted by believing that they know that a person has to have done something wrong in order to be poor,” in reality, “I can tell you that more and more folks have more than one job and are still needing help.” (As I reported last week, audio recorded by a McDonald’s worker-activist showed a counselor on an employee hotline encouraging her to sign up for food stamps because it “takes a lot of the pressure off how much money you spend on groceries.”) Purvis added that cutting food stamps was “not even good business sense,” because each dollar of food stamps infuses over $1.70 of spending into the economy….

@NickKristof Pity she's not a middle-class person facing a $90 a month increase in health plan premiums. Maybe CBS would do a story on her.

— billmonster (@billmon1) October 30, 2013

As always, it’s where the 4th Amendment and basic human dignity go to die:

The incident began January 2, 2013 after David Eckert finished shopping at the Wal-Mart in Deming. According to a federal lawsuit, Eckert didn’t make a complete stop at a stop sign coming out of the parking lot and was immediately stopped by law enforcement.

Eckert’s attorney, Shannon Kennedy, said in an interview with KOB that after law enforcement asked him to step out of the vehicle, he appeared to be clenching his buttocks. Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity. While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.

[...]

While there, Eckert was subjected to repeated and humiliating forced medical procedures. A review of Eckert’s medical records, which he released to KOB, and details in the lawsuit show the following happened:

1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.

2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.

8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

Throughout this ordeal, Eckert protested and never gave doctors at the Gila Regional Medical Center consent to perform any of these medical procedures.

Obviously, in an even moderately just universe all of the police and medical personnel involved would have been relieved of their duties and be facing criminal charges. But another major culprit here is the magistrate who issued the warrant. Granted, the police and doctors appear to have gone beyond its technical terms. But, still, the idea that failing to come to a full stop and clenching one’s buttocks constitutes the “probable cause” the Constitution requires for a warrant for this kind of search is absurd. Law enforcement acted abominably here, but they did so in part because the magistrate failed. (Incidentally, this is one reason that that conservatives on the Supreme Court were dead wrong to exempt legal errors by magistrates from the exclusionary rule. Evidence obtained through an illegal warrant should not be admissible even if the officers were acting in “good faith,” although of course here everyone was acting in bad faith.)

From Oliva Nuzzi, at NSFWCorp:

If the fall of the Nixon Administration can be blamed on one man, that man is not Bob Woodward. Nor is it Carl Bernstein, nor Deep Throat. It’s a soft-spoken, bespectacled lawyer with a mind like two steel traps named John W. Dean III, who served as White House Counsel for Nixon between 1970 and 1973 — the eye of the Watergate storm. As the events in the Watergate timeline click past their fortieth anniversary, Dean is finalizing what may be The Book of The Scandal.

He has also been conducting a series of workshops for lawyers on the Pandora’s box of legal ethics opened up by Watergate. Addressing more than 100 legal professionals in a packed auditorium near New York City’s Battery Park, Dean recently spent three hours speaking about his famous “cancer on the presidency” conversation with Nixon on March 21, 1973. Shortly afterwards, I asked him to tell me even more…

NSFWCORP: When you joined the Nixon Administration in 1970, did you have any sense that it might meet the fate it ultimately met?




John W. Dean: Not a clue. The president to me was the public-image Nixon, who was not the real person I later discovered.




NSFWCORP: Did it occur to you at any point before the establishment of the Plumbers Unit that there was something wrong with the way Nixon dealt with leaks?




JWD: Before creating the Plumbers Unit, Nixon dealt with leaks much as President Obama has — through the Justice Department and FBI. This was a proper procedure, and national
 security leaks are a serious problem. No president can operate in a fish bowl. Because
 I had been involved in stopping a senseless burglary of the Brookings Institute, I was 
excluded from the Plumbers Unit. Those running this Unit had been told not to tell me of 
their activities. Indeed, I would have told them they were crazy, had I known they were
 going to break into Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office after leaking the Pentagon Papers, 
just as I did with the Brookings. I did not learn until long after Watergate that Nixon 
had ordered the break in at the Brookings to look for leaked material….

NSFWCORP: At any point did you think the cover-up could be successful?




JWD: Before the election and until the trial of the Watergate burglars plus Hunt and Liddy.
After that I knew it would only work if I was willing to lie, and since I was not willing to do that, I knew it was doomed — it was only a matter of time…

NSFWCORP: Did Watergate ever end for you? Certainly Nixon thought it had ended for him when he made his comeback; others tried to hide from it. 




JWD: For about thirty years, I never talked (nor thought) about Watergate. The bogus
 Watergate revisionists forced me to address it, [I couldn’t] allow them to distort this history
 beyond reorganization. When that first happened in 1991, I was in a fortunate position 
where I could take them on and did. I used civil litigation to open files of the Watergate
 Special Prosecutor’s office that might have been decades in the future before they became
 accessible. Because of this litigation, today I know far more about Watergate than when 
I lived it. As the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approached, it occurred
 to me, and my publisher agreed, that I should try to answer a question that had long
 bothered me: How could anyone as politically and media savvy as Richard Nixon create 
the deeply flawed defense that he was unaware of the Watergate cover-up until I told
him on March 21, 1973? This was the core of his defense, along with efforts to discredit 
me.

To answer that question I found I had to do what no one had done — catalog and
 transcribe all Nixon’s Watergate conversations. I discovered there are just under one 
thousand conversations. The Watergate Special Prosecutor transcribed some eighty
 conversations, all but about a dozen are merely first drafts by FBI secretaries. Historians 
have done partial transcripts of another 320 conversations. So I decided to do them all
 from scratch. It has taken my team of graduate students four years, and we are almost
 finished. While I am not writing a book of transcripts, rather writing an account based
 on all the Watergate conversations, which will be in your bookstore next year, shortly
 before August 9, 2014, the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s departure from office. Title: “The
 Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It.”

One hopes future historians will be appropriately grateful. Much more at the link, for the next 47 hours or until you subscribe.

I’ll take it.

And now, let us remember that he beat a bad man. Michael Mann:

“I congratulate Terry McAuliffe, a man truly worthy of being the next Governor of the great Commonwealth of Virginia. As for Ken Cuccinelli, I am pleased to see Virginia voters reject his destructive and dangerous brand of politics, and his contempt for science and rational thought.”

And a final word to Dahlia Lithwick:

But don’t let that distract from what really happened in Virginia today: An official who consistently used his elected office to promote policies that shamed, marginalized, and patronized women and other minorities was met with a “no.” This wasn’t just about money, or the shutdown, or Star Scientific, or Terry McAuliffe’s fancy Clinton-era friends. It was about voters and what they know to be true. The vote may have been close, but in the end Virginians, especially women, showed that they simply don’t believe that the commonwealth of Virginia should be in the business of discriminating against homosexuals, legislating an extreme anti-sodomy agenda, shuttering Planned Parenthood clinics, pressing an invasive trans-vaginal ultrasound law, and supporting a draconian illegal immigration law.

[...]

Virginia women who were mostly affronted by talk of trans-vaginal ultrasounds and clinic closures and constraints on birth control, know a whole lot about what they need to be protected from and when. And today they voted to “protect” themselves from Ken Cuccinelli.

…see also.

Got distracted and derailed a bit this week, so I won’t have a chance to check in with Buck Williams and his thrilling rescue of Tsion from Zion. (In other words, no Left Behind Friday this week.)

Here, instead, is a news item from yesterday that underscores the sad influence of the Left Behind novels and their whole silly form of fright-peddling: “Texas to Tea Party: No, the Alamo Won’t Fall Under U.N. Control.”

“Bible prophecy scholars” like Tim LaHaye and San Antonio’s own John Hagee are obsessed with the United Nations, and thanks to their hard work, millions of their followers are obsessed with it too. LaHaye’s major “contribution” to dispensationalist ideology was his grafting in of old John Birch Society legends, simply replacing their dishonest paranoia about a Communist one-world government with fears of an Antichrist one-world government instead.

This is the main difference between the tea party of the 21st century and the Birchers of the 1950s and ’60s. Take any Bircher pamphlet from 1960 and replace “Communism” with “Antichrist” and you’ve got a usable 2013 tea party pamphlet. The same fright is being peddled, it’s just been re-branded and re-packaged.

An angry white man uses the American flag as a weapon of violence at some point in the 20th century. (Photo by Stanley Forman)

The tea party has the same political effect that original Bircherism had — making good and necessary things harder to do. And it has the same human effect — ensnaring the gullible and the fearful in a miserable cocoon of falsehood, fright, indignation and baseless resentment.

The latter is often more troublesome, at least on a personal level. Jen Senko’s documentary The Brainwashing of My Dad covers familiar territory for many of us. Like most of us, Senko isn’t mainly concerned that her brainwashed dad is voting for the opponents of the people she’s voting for. Her main concern about her dad is that he is angry all the time, desperately unhappy, and filled with a bitter hatred toward people he didn’t hate before.

Yes, I’m concerned about the political effect of the tea partiers and the rest of the neo-Birchers politicized by hate media and the hateful heresies of Tim LaHaye and John Hagee — particularly when their politics literally results in taking food off the table of hungry families. But it’s never only about politics. The political misery these folks are spreading is a kind of collateral damage to the misery they’re fabricating and ingesting themselves.

Here are a bunch of recent stories reflecting this misery. The politics are pernicious and harmful, but in every case there’s also a grave harm being done to the very people promoting that politics:

• “This is the New World Order Obama health reform. The reform includes a microchip implant to citizens in 2013. …”

• “She’s railing against immigration reform, citing her belief that it will lead to an identification system indicative of biblical End Times.”

• “Hedke said the [anti-sustainable-development] measure was motivated by complaints from constituents who think there is an insidious attempt to create new layers of government through groups like the Regional Economic Area Partnership in Wichita.”

• “Melissa Wilson, wife of state Rep. Kenneth Wilson (R), told the committee earlier this month that she was certain that gun records had been shared with the federal government as a part of a United Nations initiative called Agenda 21, which some conservatives believe is a conspiracy to ‘transform America from the land of the free, to the land of the collective’ through ‘a mind-control’ tactic called the Delphi technique.”

• “The study … uncovered that belief in the Second Coming of Jesus reduced the probability of strongly supporting government action on climate change.”

• “Among the dire warnings these commissioners heard during the process were allusions to the Oath Keepers’ oft-stated belief that the NDAA creates the legal pretext for federal authorities to begin rounding up right-wing citizens and placing them in concentration camps, or that they might begin labeling tea party leaders ‘enemy combatants’ and start assassinating them.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our politics is hobbled by a determined, motivated, vindictive bloc of voters driven by fear, ignorance and resentment of the Other. That’s a problem for all of us and it’s a big reason why we can’t have nice things. It does real harm and causes real pain to those it demonizes and targets — usually vulnerable outsiders and poor people.

But scared, dumb and hateful is no way to go through life. And some of the people infected with this fever are people we love and care about — parents, relatives, coworkers, friends, neighbors. Watching their downward spiral into a nasty, angry misery is unpleasant. It hurts us to see them hurting others and hurting themselves.

 

Goodbye to the western black rhino.

Who is having trouble registering to vote under the new Texas voter ID law? None other than former Speaker of the House Jim Wright. Now 90, he doesn’t have a valid driver’s license. So his voter registration attempt was denied. He’ll work it out because he’s Jim Wright. But what about all the older people will less political power, the poor, college students, brown people? In other words, the Texas law is working precisely how its writers hoped it would. But hey, at least Jim Wright’s political career has a nice cycle to it.

We want to make sure that every eligible Texan who wants to cast a ballot can,” Pierce said. “We want to help any Texan who needs additional information.”

Wright, who said he has voted in every election since 1944, lamented that such help is called for.

“From my youth I have tried to expand the elections,” Wright said. “I pushed to abolish the poll tax. I was the first to come out for lowering the voting age to 18.”

Began in an age of voter suppression. Ends in an age of voter suppression.

A group of climate scientists, including former NASA scientist James Hansen, are calling for more nuclear power to address climate change:

Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires. While it may be theoretically possible to stabilize the climate without nuclear power, in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power

We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently. Innovation and economies of scale can make new power plants even cheaper than existing plants. Regardless of these advantages, nuclear needs to be encouraged based on its societal benefits.

All the nuclear technology near my house is 40+ years old, of the same vintage (not the same design) as the Fukushima reactors. In general, utility operators aren’t building new nuclear plants, so I don’t see how adding more nuclear capacity could happen without a major government initiative, and that would be socialism.

.

Mark Rank, in the NYTimes:

… Contrary to popular belief, the percentage of the population that directly encounters poverty is exceedingly high. My research indicates that nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).

Even more astounding, if we add in related conditions like welfare use, near-poverty and unemployment, four out of five Americans will encounter one or more of these events.

In addition, half of all American children will at some point during their childhood reside in a household that uses food stamps for a period of time.

Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when…

The typical pattern is for an individual to experience poverty for a year or two, get above the poverty line for an extended period of time, and then perhaps encounter another spell at some later point. Events like losing a job, having work hours cut back, experiencing a family split or developing a serious medical problem all have the potential to throw households into poverty.

Just as poverty is widely dispersed with respect to time, it is also widely dispersed with respect to place. Only approximately 10 percent of those in poverty live in extremely poor urban neighborhoods. Households in poverty can be found throughout a variety of urban and suburban landscapes, as well as in small towns and communities across rural America. This dispersion of poverty has been increasing over the past 20 years, particularly within suburban areas…

We currently expend among the fewest resources within the industrialized countries in terms of pulling families out of poverty and protecting them from falling into it. And the United States is one of the few developed nations that does not provide universal health care, affordable child care, or reasonably priced low-income housing. As a result, our poverty rate is approximately twice the European average.

Whether we examine childhood poverty, poverty among working-age adults, poverty within single-parent families or overall rates of poverty, the story is much the same — the United States has exceedingly high levels of impoverishment. The many who find themselves in poverty are often shocked at how little assistance the government actually provides to help them through tough times…

The solutions to poverty are to be found in what is important for the health of any family — having a job that pays a decent wage, having the support of good health and child care and having access to a first-rate education. Yet these policies will become a reality only when we begin to truly understand that poverty is an issue of us, rather than an issue of them.

Stigmatizing poverty as a personal failure is hardly an American invention, but refining and reinforcing the “self-made man in the land of opportunity” trope has been a major success for the One Percenters. Accusing someone of having been poor is like accusing a pre-Kinsley American of sexual deviancy — even if they were unimpeachably a victim (a child forced into pornography, or the use of food stamps) it’s a slur against one’s character.

James Fallows gets a lot of good emails from insiders. Here’s one from someone he knows about last week’s NSA leaks concerning the infiltration of Google and Yahoo:

I obviously can’t be quoted by name on this … and indeed, since this email is being read (Hi guys!), I can probably get fired just for sending it, but let me just stress how shocking these NSA revelations are.

Look, I’m not a shrinking violet. I work for DoD. I support much of the war on terror. Some of these assholes out there just need killing. And gathering info on them that allows us to schwhack them is okay with me.

But there is law. And my view is that you have two choices. Either you change the law openly, publicly, or if that is impossible and you consider violating the law imperative, then you make a claim of “exceptional illegality.” The later is a tough case, but the best example is torture. I support the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I do not support the claim that such torture is lawful. But if I had been the responsible official, I would have ordered it and thrown myself on the mercy of the court.

But the thing about the NSA revelations is that this isn’t exceptional illegality. It is routine, somehow justified by legal opinions written by John Yoo-style hacks.

And worse, it is so routine that 29 y/o contractors have access to it.

There are a couple of other letters worth reading at the link.

This 2012 video from Politizane does an excellent job of illustrating the massive, well-documented gap between the wealth-distribution that Americans believe they have, the distribution they would favor (regardless of political affiliation), and what America actually has: a system that rewards CEOs at 380 times the rate of their average employees.

Wealth Inequality in America (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

I think that if I ever heard someone give voice to Calvin or Hobbes in an animated special, I’d never be able to read the comic again. It’s not that I’m bothered by commercialism, but rather that I regard both as perpetually unsettled identities; hearing either would require me to force an age and (perhaps) an ethnic identity onto the character, and I think that would ruin the illusion.

Years ago, you hadn’t quite dismissed the notion of animating the strip. Are you a fan of Pixar? Does their competency ever make the idea of animating your creations more palatable?
The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.