Brian Stouffer

Color me shocked that a Republican as principled and upstanding as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is as crooked as a bag of snakes.*

You’d think McDonnell would have just waited for the big grift until he was out of office and a lobbyist himself.

* I would like to offer an official apology to all snakes for comparing them to Bob McDonnell.

Most Interesting Man in the World, meet your match.

On Sunday, Twitter user Matthew Barrett created something of a sensation by linking to the obscure Wikipedia biography of the British army officer Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart. His tweet -- "This guy surely has the best opening paragraph of any Wikipedia biography ever" -- has been retweeted more than 3,200 times over the past several days.[[BREAK]]

This guy surely has the best opening paragraph of any Wikipedia biography ever http://t.co/XR2ZZumavH

— Matthew Barrett (@MBarrettCH) July 7, 2013

So just how mind-blowing is the introduction on Carton de Wiart's page? Judge for yourself:

Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart^[1]VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 - 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He fought in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn't amputate them. He later said "frankly I had enjoyed the war." ^[2]

On Twitter, some are simply in awe, while others are pointing out that the rest of the bio is pretty stellar too:

Check Norris is like a wimpy school kid compared to this guy http://t.co/6HQNoK7ABi

— Alex Loveless (@alexmloveless) July 11, 2013

Find me a more intense wikipedia intro paragraph than this and I will bite my own fingers off: http://t.co/KszFyu15ot

— (Ryan) M (@LeastActionHero) July 9, 2013

Awesome bio. Once evaded capture disguised as an Italian peasant despite no Italian, one arm, one eye, and 61. http://t.co/2BrbAqZqh8

— David Dawson (@baconvalentine) July 10, 2013

"In 1908 he married Countess Friederike Maria Karoline Henriette Rosa Sabina Franziska Fugger von Babenhausen" http://t.co/g9XIsRbsvt

— bath (@youneedabath) July 10, 2013

So who was this man of extraordinary valor? A Daily Mail profile last year relays much of the same information contained on Carton de Wiart's Wikipedia page: By the end of his life, the British soldier had been awarded his military's highest honor for bravery during World War I and served in the Second Boer War and World War II, commanding troops in a daring World War II raid in Norway. He wore a black patch to cover a missing eye, and had been wounded in the skull, groin, ankle, and stomach. A missing hand betrayed a grisly backstory -- he had once chewed off his own wounded fingers. He had tunneled out of an Italian prisoner-of-war camp, and had wound up there after crashing his plane in the Mediterranean. To top it all off, he had also served as Winston Churchill's special representative to China's Chiang Kai-shek. He had indeed remarked that he "enjoyed" World War I, going on to add that "it had given me many bad moments, lots of good ones, plenty of excitement and with everything found for us." (Readers in the U.K., you may want to go check out Carton de Wiart's 20-bore, double-barreled shotgun, which just went on display in Leeds.)

Judging by his autobiography, Carton de Wiart adopted his swashbuckling ways from an early age, when he left university at Oxford to fight in the Boer War: 

At that moment I knew, once and for all, that war was in my blood. I was determined to fight and I didn't mind who or what. I didn't know why the war had started, and I didn't care on which side I was to fight. If the British didn't fancy me I would offer myself to the Boers, and at least I did not endow myself with Napoleonic powers or imagine I would make the slightest difference to whichever side I fought for.

I know now that the ideal soldier is the man who fights for his country because it is fighting, and for no other reason. Causes, politics and ideologies are better left to the historians.

Readers, if you have a suggestion for a Wikipedia page that rivals this one, leave it in the comments.

Chait claims that Republicans are now incapable of compromise. Waldman feels that Republicans have ”reimagined the lawmaking process as a kind of extended ideological performance art piece, one that no longer has anything to do with laws in the “I’m Just a Bill” sense.” Douthat counters:

Take away the legalization-first provisions, and you lose the bill’s unanimous Democratic support; take away its promise of cheap labor, and you lose its key right-of-center constituency (the Chamber of Commerce and business in general); take away both, and the bill starts to look like the kind of much more modest legislation that the House has already passed. And if you prefer that kind of modest, “let’s have more high-skilled workers” reform to what the Senate bill sets out to do, it’s hard to see how an amendment or a conference is going to close the gulf between the two approaches, and simply ridiculous to say that opponents should vote yes now and save their objections till the next debate or “the next generation.” On the contrary: Opposing the central features of a major piece of legislation is pretty much the definition of a good reason to cut bait and just vote “no.”

But since the entire point of the bill is to do something about the plight of millions of illegal aliens already in the country who cannot be rounded up and deported en masse, criticizing it for doing just that is absurd. It’s not a “modest version” of the bill to restrict it to just high-skilled workers. It’s a gutting of the entire point of it. It reminds me of the GOP’s response to healthcare reform. They simply assume that all those who need healthcare can do without it – or besiege emergency rooms as they now do. All they want is their ideologically pure versions of laws … or nothing whatever.

Legislation exists to solve or ameliorate tangible, emergent problems. But for Ross, the uninsured can just disappear and illegal immigrants can be ignored when they are not being deported. This is why this approach is nihilist. It has no intention of doing anything to address these bleedingly obvious problems. It just wishes them away because they require some ideological adjustment or a willingness to work within the system with a duly elected president and Senate and make compromises. And wishing them away consigns millions to radical insecurity in their lives, jobs and health.

It’s also worth noting that Ross is attacking core tenets of Catholic teachings on both universal healthcare and immigration. That would not matter if he didn’t portray himself as an advocate for Catholic policies over all. But believing that the poor can do without healthcare and that illegal immigrants can simply survive as useful outcasts in this country is so counter to the core teachings of the Gospels it’s still striking to see a leading Catholic legitimize them. Why does Ross not acknowledge how opposed he is to the church’s teachings on this issue? And explain why?

Another Catholic, Ramesh Ponnuru, is in no rush to pass an immigration bill:

I think the interests of illegal immigrants have some weight, because they’re people, and if the lot of any group of people can be improved that is, all else equal, worth doing. But offering them legalization is not a requirement of justice, and so it’s fine to haggle over terms.

What’s so striking about this is that the fact that illegal immigrants are human beings is a concession here. It seems to me that in a humane society, let alone for a Catholic, that is a premise, not a concession. And haggling over terms is what legislation is about. It’s precisely what the GOP refuses to do – on anything.

(Photo: A sick elephant by STR/AFP Images.)

The mining industry has always loved violent labor intimidation, armed thugs, paramilitary operations against unions, and other fun parts of the Gilded Age we once thought we had left behind us. But with the new Gilded Age upon us, mining companies are happy to go old-school:

Heavily-armed, masked paramilitary forces descended upon the Gogebic Taconite mining site in Wisconsin over the weekend, much to the chagrin of local residents and elected officials.

“I’m appalled,” state Sen. Bob Jauch (D) told The Wisconsin State Journal on Monday. “There is no evidence to justify their presence.”

Jaunch sent a letter to Gogebic President Bill Williams on Monday demanding the company remove the guards, which he called “common in third world countries,” but stressed that “they don’t belong in Northern Wisconsin.”

The company brought in the paramilitary forces after being confronted by a group of about 15 protesters in June. At least one of the demonstrators, a young woman, was hit with misdemeanor charges for trying to take a camera away from one of the company’s geologists. Gogebic claims they’ve since caught several people illegally camping on their property and did not want to take any chances.

The company hired by Gogebic is Arizona-based Bulletproof Securities, which boasts that many of their employees are ex-military and many of their clients are celebrities and government officials. They certainly look the part, too: photos of Bulletproof guards at the Gegebic site published by the Wisconsin progressive blog Blue Cheddar show men who look very much like special forces soldiers, complete with assault rifles and black masks.

The protests against the iron mine revolve around the Chippewa, who have a reservation just to the north of the mine site, claiming that pollution from the mine will contaminate their land and destroy their wild rice beds, which really is even more perfect. The Gilded Age was also great for forcibly stealing resources from indigenous peoples so bringing that back would be an added bonus, right?

A couple of Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers have asked the corporation to remove the armed thugs, but you think the government of Scott Walker cares? Of course not.

Jeff Guo has a good piece at The New Republic on how Michelle Rhee’s StudentsLast First organization has centered on Tennessee to push its anti-teacher union agenda. Yet despite the massive amount of money it and its corporate supporters have poured into Tennessee politics, they have received almost nothing to show for it. Tennessee Governor Jim Haslam hired Rhee’s ex-husband, Kevin Huffman, to run the state Department of Education. Rhee considers it her personal mission to crush Tennessee teacher unions and promote her own brand of corporatized education. But it turns out that the people of Tennessee resented huge amounts of money poured into local school board elections and began voting for opponents of the recipients of that largesse precisely because of it.

This hardly means Tennessee is going to become a pro-teacher union state. Probably some of Rhee’s insidious agenda will end up passing next year. What it does suggest is that Rhee has a very poor understanding of how politics actually work outside of Beltway board rooms and corporate fundraisers. In the end, money doesn’t always actually buy votes. Especially when it looks like your children are being used for an experiment.

Fed up with Karzai, Obama is leaning more toward the “zero option” in Afghanistan: no troops at all after next year. I sure hope that’s where we end up. Obama’s election in 2008 was a clear repudiation of the reckless interventionism of the recent past; his re-election in 2012 cemented the shift toward a global American role that is more attuned to our balance sheet and our actual security threats. Leaving remnants of empire behind in places like Iraq and Afghanistan undermines that shift, re-legitimizes the notion that the US must somehow control every nook and cranny of the globe (we can’t and it corrupts us when we try).

That’s the change Obama represented to the next generation: a pragmatic adjustment to a reality that has nothing to do with the neocon and boomer mindsets of the past.. He has delivered, by and large. But the clarity of the departures is what will help define the future: a future of limits.

Jonathan Martin reported over the weekend that “Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls, in ways subtle and overt, are eager to focus a spotlight on Mrs. Clinton’s age.” Tomasky expects that strategy to backfire:

[J]ust as the Republicans cemented that loyalty by overdoing their attacks on her in the earlier White House years, so they will again, and they’ll make her a figure of sympathy to Middle America just as they did before. Talk about hard-wired: they so seethe with hatred for her, and are so incapable of understanding that the vast majority of America not only doesn’t share their hatred but indeed has named her our country’s most admired woman in 17 of the last 20 years, that they’ll say and do things that may well convert young people into her most ardent defenders. After a few Republican “jokes” about Clinton’s appearance, 70 will never have seemed so appealing.

Allahpundit suggests a slightly different line of attack:

The problem with Hillary isn’t that she’ll be almost 70 by election day, it’s that she’ll have been a Beltway institution for close to 25 years at that point. If, like many Americans, you’re disgusted with the federal government generally and Congress in particular, why nominate someone who’s been a “co-president,” senator, and Secretary of State, and not particularly effective in any role?

Barro counters:

[L]et’s say Republicans manage to walk a fine line: hit her for having “old ideas” and being around Washington too long without directly invoking her age. The strategy still doesn’t make any sense, because the Republicans are the party of old, tired ideas.

And Marc Tracy wants Hillary to embrace her status as a Baby Boomer:

There is no seeing Clinton without the Baby Boomer connotation. So she should make that work for her. Her campaign could be the Boomers’ last go-round. She could explicitly ask the country to give her generation, through her, one last chance to address those problems—from dangeous climate change to galloping entitlement costs—that in the past her generation has been fairly accused of selfishly ignoring or even abetting. And at the same time she could run as an advocate and even embodiment of all the big things the Boomers got right: personal freedoms, including abortion rights; tolerance of gays and lesbians and other classes of citizens who 50 years ago were outcasts; and, above all, feminism.

God save us from another boomer president.

I have my wrap-up on the end of term at the Supreme Court. In brief, 1)the Court had a larger impact than unusual, 2)this impact was mostly bad, and 3)bad or (less likely) good it generally did a horrible job justifying itself. But read the whole etc.:

Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School observed that “[s]imply considered as efforts to persuade, using the conventional tools of legal reasoning, the majority opinions in the three blockbuster cases—Fisher, Shelby County, and Windsor—were real failures.” Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion striking down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, as was noted across the ideological spectrum, was incoherent mush, flirting awkwardly with federalism, due process, and equal protection rationales without ever quite summoning up the courage to invite one to the prom. In the Supreme Court’s latest foray into affirmative action, neither the majority nor concurring opinions even attempted to explain how subjecting affirmative action to strict scrutiny can be squared with conservative constitutional principles.

Still, Shelby County takes the cake here. Ruling on the heart of one of the most important statutes ever passed by the United States Congress places a particularly high burden on the Court to give intelligible (if not necessarily persuasive to all) reasons for its actions. But Roberts’s opinion in this regard was an utter failure, unable to even identify the constitutional provision the Voting Rights Act allegedly violated. Roberts’s opinion first gestured at the Tenth Amendment, but the Voting Rights Act obviously did not violate it. The Tenth Amendment says that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States,” but since Section Two of the Fifteenth in fact unambiguously delegates to Congress the power to prevent racial discrimination in voting, the Tenth Amendment is irrelevant to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts also cited the “equal sovereignty of the states,” which has no basis in the text in the Constitution or, as he used it, in the Supreme Court’s precedents. The few previous cases to discuss the “equal sovereignty of the states” refer merely to new states being on equal footing in terms of admission with the original 13. No previous case has ever suggested that Congress cannot pass valid legislation that affects states differently, not surprisingly since this 1) would be transparently unworkable, and 2) the Constitution protects the equality of persons, not states. Leaving aside the bad policy established by the VRA case, the Chief Justice’s majority opinion simply fails at the basic tasks a Supreme Court opinion must perform to justify striking down an act of Congress.

As you would expect given the parties involved, Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick’s argument that with the progress towards SSM the agenda of the left is exhausted is smart and interesting reading. But I’m not sure I really buy the bottom-line argument:

But did you notice that, on the way to this victory, the left, as a movement, seemed to abandon almost everything else for which it once stood? That while gay marriage rose like cream to the top of the liberal agenda, the rest of what the left once cherished was shoved aside, ignored, or “it’s complicated” to oblivion? Stipulate: Gay rights is an unequivocally just cause. But this win, however deserved, addresses no more than a small fraction of what the left once believed essential.

I assume here that by “left” Friedman and Lithwick here are referring to liberals mainstream enough to be a major part of a winning national coalition, not “the left” in some global sense (where there’s obviously a robust agenda but very few jurisdictions in the United States in which even being a major coalition partner is viable.) Even so, I don’t think that the progressive agenda has been excessively dominated by same-sex marriage. Last week alone, we saw a robust defense of reproductive rights in one of the most conservative states in the country, the president giving a major speech on climate change that wasn’t just symbolic bully pulpitism but had an eye on viable policy changes, and strong opposition to an odious voting rights decision. For just one week of a news cycle, seems like a pretty robust agenda to me. And, of course, within the last four years we’ve also seen major comprehensive health care legislation that is going to involve a lot of fights to implement properly, fights that liberals are committed to.

I think the apparent focus on same-sex marriage has its source in something else. For example, the reason that the left won on same-sex marriage while getting hammered on other civil and labor rights issues in this Supreme Court term had nothing to do with the liberals on the court, who voted consistently. The key dynamic, as I argued earlier today, is whether it’s an issue where a conservative justice can be peeled off:

The somewhat erratic record on such issues is a straightforward outgrowth of the necessity for the Court’s four-member liberal bloc to obtain at least one additional vote. In some issues—Kennedy on LBGT rights, Scalia and Thomas on some civil liberties issues—this is possible. But on the larger number of issues where all five of the conservative justices exhibit hostility to the rights of women and racial minorities that increasingly characterizes the contemporary Republican coalition, backsliding is the order of the day. (And while the liberal coalition is relatively unified, Stephen Bryer is always a risk to defect in civil liberties cases.) What’s depressing going forward is that whatever heterodoxy there is to be found among the Supreme Court’s conservative wing comes from justices prior to the presidency of George W. Bush. Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the conservative nominees, is not only the kind of Republican increasingly unlikely to be found in the current GOP, he was Reagan’s third choice. If Kennedy and Scalia were to be replaced with (even) more consistent reactionaries like Alito and Roberts, we would be looking a Court as consistently to the right of the mainstream as the New Deal Court that precipitated a near constitutional crisis.

What part of the liberal agenda is successful, in other words, is dependent on whether any of the conservative majority is wiling to go along. Liberal priorities are beside the point, because they can’t achieve anything alone.

And here’s the thing: the dynamic of the current Supreme Court is a pretty good microcosm of the current American political context, except that most Republican parties are composed almost entirely of Alitos. Even mainstream liberals, in national and state-wide governing bodies, are rarely functioning majorities. Some veto point — median legislative vote, executive branch, committee chair, the courts — is typically controlled by a Republican or conservative Democrat. The liberal agenda can proceed only if some non-liberals are willing to be allies.

Which is why same-sex marriage has been a rare source of victory in a time of reaction. Wealthy conservative Democrats and (if any) moderate Republicans are 1)much more likely to have liberal positions on social issues than economic ones, and — this is important — 2)bans on same-sex marriage affect the rich and poor alike. (The same group of people might oppose or be indifferent about legal restrictions on abortion — but regulations of abortion affect poor women far more than affluent ones. But rich people in states where SSM is illegal still can’t get married.) It’s far easier to find moderate or fake-moderate allies on same-sex marriage than on abortion. And climate change or card check legislation — forget it.

An instructive example is the respective fate of legalizing in same-sex marriage and strong reproductive rights legislation in the New York state assembly. The latter didn’t fail because liberals, even fairly broadly construed, were less committed to it. It failed because the wealthy Republican donors who could pressure marginal senators on same-sex marriage weren’t going to be around to fight for reproductive rights. And even a relatively progressive state, without some support from DINOs or moderate Republicans, the robustness of the liberal agenda is beside the point because you’re generally out of luck.

There’s some truth to the Friedman/Lithwick thesis — in particular, labor issues need to be a higher priority. But in general, I think the problem isn’t the lack of a robust liberal agenda so much as that the institutional reality of American politics is that liberals are all too rarely in a position to enact anything.

There was always something desperate about them: an attempt somehow, after five years of remarkably scandal-free governance, to try once again and prove Michelle Malkin’s fantasies (and Peggy Noonan’s feelings) correct. Darrell Issa was the perfect charlatan for the purpose; and Roger Ailes desperately needed a new narrative in the post-election doldrums. But there really was no there there … and you can feel the air escaping from the hysteria balloons. Chait marks the end of this strange interlude of Republicans’ creating reality and failing:

The IRS inspector general is defending its probe, but the IRS’s flagging of conservative groups seems, at worst, to be marginally stricter than its flagging of liberal groups, not the one-sided political witch hunt portrayed by early reports.

What about the rest of the scandals? Well, there aren’t any, and there never were. Benghazi is a case of a bunch of confused agencies caught up in a fast-moving story trying to coordinate talking points. The ever-shifting third leg of the Obama scandal trifecta — Obama’s prosecution of leaks, or use of the National Security Agency — is not a scandal at all. It’s a policy controversy. One can argue that Obama’s policy stance is wrong, or dangerous, or a threat to democracy. But when the president is carrying out duly passed laws and acting at every stage with judicial approval, then the issue is the laws themselves, not misconduct.

The whole Obama scandal episode is a classic creation of a “narrative” — the stitching together of unrelated data points into a story.

(Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Tim Noah recognizes that “one of the ironies of the marriage equality movement is the conservative movement’s stubborn refusal to recognize its fundamentally conservative nature”:

John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner [of Lawrence v. Texas] were not conservatives’ type of people. One was demonstrably irresponsible, the other was a rootless drifter, and their case was about a sexual act (albeit one never actually committed) that most conservatives really don’t like to think about. Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer [of U.S. v. Windsor], on the other hand, are precisely conservatives’ type of people (except for their sexual orientation and maybe their politics). They are (in Spyer’s case, were) affluent and mutually committed and responsible members of society. Their case is about not being bullied by the IRS into paying too much in taxes, which is something conservatives fret about all the time.

When the history books are written, one likely conclusion will be that the swift ascendancy of gay rights in the second decade of the 21st century was largely attributable to gay people’s relentless pursuit of a boring lifestyle.

And this has definitely affected my views about American conservatism. There is a conservative position against marriage equality, which is simply resistance to any drastic change in such a crucial institution. But thanks to federalism, we can now see that fears of unintended consequences have not materialized so far in any of the equality states, and that marriage as a whole is in a much worse state where heterosexuals-only marriage endures. What you would expect an actual socially conservative party to do would be to adapt to these new realities, after legitimate initial skepticism, and try to coopt an emerging social group by integrating them into society in a conservative way.

Imagine, say, a pro-marriage movement among African-Americans. Do you think the GOP would oppose it ferociously? Imagine any group’s desire to leave behind leftist balkanization and cultural revolt in order to embrace the values of family, stability and responsibility. On what grounds would the GOP oppose it? None. So why the resilient hostility to gay conservatives and their remarkable triumph in a traditionally leftist sub-population? In fact, it is precisely those gay conservatives who are barred from Fox News – or immediately hazed by homophobes like Erick Erickson.

In Britain, you can see a direct analogy. The Tories went from hostility to homosexual equality in the 1980s to an embrace of it as a conservative cause in the 21st Century. To cite David Cameron’s speech to his own party conference:

“I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative, I support gay marriage because I am a conservative.”

Canada’s and New Zealand’s Conservative parties have also backed the reform. And many Republicans have supported it now as well. So why the remaining resilience?

The only real explanation is religious fundamentalism. The GOP, at its core, is a religious organization, not a political one. It is digging in deeper on immigration reform, and marriage equality, and abortion. It is not acting as a rational actor in political competition but as a fundamentalist movement, gerrymandering its way to total resistance to modernity’s increasing diversity of views and beliefs. It is emphatically not a socially conservative force: it is a radical, fundamentalist movement, incapable of accepting any political settlement that does not comport with unchanging, eternal dicta.

It is the great tragedy of the era that Republicans targeted one of the few grass-roots, genuinely conservative movements as their implacable enemy in the last quarter century. They went after the one group truly trying to shore up and support marriage – and they even wanted to amend the Constitution to do so. They did so, I believe, for one reason alone: fundamentalism. And that is not conservatism. In so many ways, it is conservatism’s eternal nemesis: the refusal to adjust to the times in favor of an ideology that never changes.

(Photo: Same-sex couple Joseph and Jim pose for a photo as they wait to be officially married at the Manhattan City Clerk’s Office on the first day New York State’s Marriage Equality Act went into effect July 24, 2011 in New York City. By Anthony Behar-Pool/Getty Images.)

OK, this is awesome. Dylan Byers at Politico gets Erick son of Erick to respond to my observation that, although he rants about the rising prices of milk and bread — which somehow has something to do with pundits riding the Acela — the truth is that milk and bread prices have been flat for about five years, and in particular have gone nowhere despite all that money the Fed has printed. And Erickson’s response is, hey, it isn’t true, but people feel that it’s true:

Not everything is academic or chartable and sometimes the accuracy of the chart isn’t as real to people as the perception they have that their grocery store bills are getting more expensive though their shopping habits haven’t changed.

…

Seriously, Paul’s point is correct, but it is an issue of perception of people versus the reality of his chart. He can certainly go tell people milk prices haven’t gone up, but good luck getting them to believe him.

Notice, by the way, the implication that I don’t appreciate the problems real people (who don’t eat quiche or ride the Acela) are facing; actually, I do, but those problems are lack of jobs and stagnant wages, not rising prices. And if you want to solve problems, getting the nature of those problems right matters.

But then, only elitists want to solve problems; true men of the people just vent, and what matters is perception, not truth.

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Ilya Shapiro has a somewhat longer piece attempting to defend Shelby County v. Holder. Along with Roberts’s majority opinion, it’s as effective an argument against the outcome of the case as any rebuttal could be. Let me start with what Shapiro doesn’t mention:

• Section 2 of the 15th Amendment
• Any constitutional provision the Voting Rights Act violates

These omissions are, in and of themselves, sufficient to dispose of Shapiro’s argument.  There is no free standing right to “state sovereignty” protected by the Constitution.  States are sovereign except when their sovereignty is superseded by an exercise of power delegated to the federal government.  Since preventing racial discrimination in voting is unambiguously an area of federal authority, there’s by definition no “state sovereignty” being abridged.   The federal government has the power to enforce the 15th Amendment, and this power does not vanish if the racial discrimination being addressed is less severe than Jim Crow.  Nor is there any requirement that Congress use any set of data to legislate when exercising its valid authority; again, this is smuggling an implicit narrow tailoring requirement into a context in which it’s utterly inappropriate.

Although nothing more really needs to be said, there’s some additional silliness that’s worth noting.  Shapiro does refer to the 15th Amendment…to argue that Section 5 “flies in the face of the 15th Amendment’s requirement that all voters be treated equally.”Well, first of all, what the 15th Amendment actually says is “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  This is fatal for Shapiro’s argument, given that the Voting Rights Act does not in fact discriminate on the basis of race.  Shapiro is not only ignoring Section 2; he’s literally arguing that the 15th Amendment prevents itself from being enforced. Admittedly, the 14th Amendment does impose a broader requirement to treat voters equally, but this doesn’t help Shapiro since again the Voting Rights Act does not violate the equal protection of the laws.  The 14th requires individuals to be treated equally; it doesn’t require states to be treated equally.  Arguing that the Voting Rights Act violates whichever of the Civil War amendments you randomly choose is like arguing that civil rights laws violate the 14th or 5th Amendment because they abridge the right of employers who discriminate to be treated identically to employers who don’t.  (Sadly, I suspect that Shapiro believes this too; it’s hard to play reductio ad absurdum with a conservertarian.  Let’s all remember to be happy that Barry Goldwater wasn’t president in 1964.)

And, of course, the equal treatment issue is a red herring, because Shapiro ultimately concludes that the Thomas was right and the Court should have just ruled Section 5 unconstitutional.   So even a national preclearance requirement that treated the states equally wouldn’t be constitutional, and equal treatment doesn’t actually have anything to do with Shaprio’s argument.  The real argument, again, is that the real powers of Section 2 of the 15th Amendment should be trumped by imaginary rights to “state sovereignty,” and again to re-state the argument is to refute it.  (Shapiro at least spares us with Roberts’s made-up right to “equal state sovereignty,” but alas he doesn’t replace that made-up right with anything else.)  And, like Roberts’s argument, the basic thrust is premised on the utterly absurd premise that legislation directed at a legitimate end suddenly becomes unconstitutional if addresses the ends too effectively.

Sometimes a correct conclusion is buttressed by an opinion that leaves a lot to be desired.  One need only go back to U.S. v. Windsor yesterday to see that — not only any other member of the majority coalition but hundreds of legal scholars could have written a more persuasive and coherent defense of the unconstitutionality of DOMA than Kennedy’s majority opinion.  In the case of Shelby, though, the majority opinion was terrible simply because there are no good arguments to be made in defense of the holding.

Former Providence mayor (for 21 years!) and now talk show blowhard Buddy Cianci, in the New York Times magazine:

Q:You once said you were convicted of being mayor of Providence. Admittedly, they got you on very petty offenses.

A: Oh, it was nickel and dime. They convicted me because an aide of mine took a thousand dollars on tape from an F.B.I. plant. They couldn’t get me at the ballot box, and so they got me that way. The world wasn’t any safer because I was at Fort Dix. But, hey, this is the business that we’ve chosen.

Q: Buddy I ended when you resigned after pleading no contest to charges that you assaulted a onetime friend whom you suspected of having an affair with your ex-wife. It was reported that you held him hostage, beat him up, threw an ashtray at him and threatened him with a burning log.

A: There was no kidnapping; he was free to go. No. 1, I picked the log up and threw it in the fireplace. He said he thought I was going to throw it at him. The prosecutor said that was putting him in reasonable apprehension of bodily harm, so that’s assault. As far as ashtrays and all these myths, that’s all bull. No. 2, no one ever urinated on anybody.

Q: I actually never even heard anything about that.

A: Oh, yeah. That’s been public. I never did that.

Q: It was a huge story when the local press discovered that in 1966 a woman you met while in law school accused you of raping her at gunpoint.

A: It didn’t happen the way the press said it happened. I was never charged with anything, never indicted, never arrested, never nothing. Was there an incident? Yeah. Was it a rape? Absolutely not. We had a togetherness, a one-night stand kind of thing.

Q: Your biographer, Mike Stanton, reported that the detective investigating the incident called it “one of the most clear-cut cases of rape” he’d seen and said that the woman passed a lie-detector test while you failed three times.

A: I never took three lie-detector tests. I never took any lie-detector test, so I don’t understand where he gets that information. That’s why I have trouble with the book.

Q: Do you think your state deserves the centuries-old nickname Rogue Island because of its long history of corruption?

A: Rhode Island could make a lot of improvements, but we love this place. The problem is, we’re too small, and everybody knows each other’s business.

I could not explain Rhode Island any better than this.

The president, it seems, committed a minor gaffe during this week's G-8 meetings in Northern Ireland. According to the Financial Times, the stumble came during a discussion of tax avoidance issues, when Barack Obama thrice interrupted the British chancellor of the exchequer in order to say he agreed with "Jeffrey."

The chancellor's name is George Osborne.[[BREAK]]

Obama later apologized, saying, "I'm sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favorite R&B singer." The U.S. leader was referring to Jeffrey Osborne, the soulful crooner responsible for "On the Wings of Love."

But is Osborne really the favorite that Obama claims? Some investigative reporting has raised serious questions about where Osborne ranks in Obama's hierarchy of musical preferences.

In multiple interviews about music, Obama has never once mentioned Osborne when asked about the songs he listens to, even when mentioning other R&B artists. Consider the following data points:

• In an interview with Cincinnati radio station WIZF, Obama says he listens to Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Fugees, and even jazz artist Gil Scott-Heron, among others. But Osborne is never brought up.

• In an interview with Rolling Stone, he specifically discusses R&B -- but again, makes no mention of Osborne (the late classical singer Maria Callas gets a shout out).

• Asked about his musical preferences by a middle school teacher while campaigning in 2007, Obama again mentions Stevie Wonder, and adds that he enjoys Earth, Wind & Fire -- but no Osborne.

So -- is Jeffrey Osborne really an artist so close to the president's heart that he could accidentally blurt out his name when addressing another country's chancellor of the exchequer? Or did Obama just forget poor George Osborne's name?

We report, you decide.

Iranian president-elect Hassan Rowhani speaks during a press conference in Tehran on June 17, 2013. Rowhani expressed hope that Iran can reach a new agreement with major powers over its disputed nuclear program, saying a deal should be reached through more transparency and mutual trust. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images.

MoDo today summed up the wisdom of everyone who championed the Iraq war and endorsed those arguments all over again. As if it never happened.

She even cites its two most persuasive proponents, McCain and Clinton. The argument is that something bad is happening in the world and because you are the American president, you need to stop it. If you don’t, you are “a wuss”. Worse, other actors, like Putin and Khamenei are intervening in Syria, so we must too – or appear “weak.” The entire scope of this argument, as with Iraq, is limited to the moral posture of the United States, the existence of an evil, the imperative of acting, and then trying to sell the American public on the action. The argument is actually weaker than for Iraq, because at least Clinton and McCain insisted at the time that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that he wanted to use against America; at the current moment, no one is saying that about Syria’s chemical arsenal. In fact, the only scenario in which the US might be the target of such weapons is if we do exactly what these “statesmen” are demanding: side with one faction or another. Then at least one side has a reason to hate us.

Does Dowd have any argument as to where such “leadership” would take us? Does she argue that arming Sunni Jihadists against Alawites and Shiites is a good thing because those Jihadists would never use such weapons or be an enemy of the US? No. Who does she want to win the Syrian civil war and why? She doesn’t say. Does she support the theological claims of Sunni Islam against Shiite Islam? I don’t know. In fact, she doesn’t explain at all what the point of her new war is, or what her preferred outcome would be. These are simply to be figured out, or in Clinton’s words, “sold” later. This foreign policy “doctrine”, if it even deserves such a designation, is essentially an endorsement of George W Bush’s presidency. Yes, MoDo hates Obama that much that in this column she has actually gone full circle and endorsed the arguments that gave us the catastrophe in a very similar country, Iraq.

Clinton also accuses the president of taking his previous, coherent and strong position on Syria not because staying out of this conflict is obviously the sanest thing to do; but because Obama is apparently just listening to the polls. The gall of Clinton of all people to accuse anyone of that level of cynicism! And the American people, he assumes, are obviously wrong. The job of a president is not to listen to them on matters of war and peace, especially if they have a collective memory longer than that of a gnat, but to ignore them, forget the lessons of the very recent past, wing it, and hope to “sell” the war later.

I write all of this in acute frustration, of course. Because I thought I understood Barack Obama’s strategy and obviously I don’t, and because I want this president to succeed and I cannot possibly see how this can lead to anything but failure. And I’m frustrated because MoDo is right about the substance and the timing of Thursday’s stomach-churning presser. How dare a sitting president delegate the explanation of such a dangerous, portentous step to anyone but himself? The sheer arrogance of that delegation of a core duty is shocking. Here’s what the president had to do that day that was more important, in his mind, than explaining why he had just committed the US to the folly of another war in another Middle Eastern country:

He spent time at an LGBT Pride Month celebration, a Father’s Day luncheon and a reception for the W.N.B.A. championship Indiana Fever basketball team.

I presumed at first this was another version of the Libya fiasco:

self-righteous hand-wringing followed by removal of a tyrant, leading to more regional destabilization and the murder of an ambassador and other Americans. Only this time, the president didn’t even muster his lame defense of the Libya mess. Or perhaps it was, as Marc Lynch calls it, a version of the Afghan surge – an act that sacrificed American lives for no conceivable end but face-saving for an exit and protecting his right flank at home. The Afghan surge remains, to my mind, morally cold. Sending mother’s sons to their death when you know it won’t work is not something even Niebuhr would endorse. But as Marc notes, at least that surge had an end-date. Not this time. So perhaps this was just a minor concession to the Sunni allies who want to win the war for their version of Islam or the European allies who keep stupidly wanting to pull off another Suez. If so, it’s an insult to them as well as to us. It won’t do anything to change anything, but will mean the US will find it progressively harder and harder to avoid more and more commitment.

So let’s posit “our side” wins. What good could possibly now come of a Sunni Jihadist victory? We’d see a mass slaughter of Alawites at best, and a metastasizing sectarian war across the Middle East in which the US would be entangled. By staying out, on the other hand, we make Putin and Iran the targets for Sunni hatred, we do not add fuel to the sectarian fire, and we do not hurt any of our strategic interests. I thought I had supported Obama over McCain and Clinton in 2008. Why are we now getting boomer-era interventionism?

For a kinder, gentler version of this screed, read Fareed. Or watch this space if and when the president deigns even to explain why he has just done what he promised never to do again.

Arguably capitalism’s greatest feat in the last century is the almost complete separation of production from consumption. Modern Americans rarely see where anything is produced, whether food or consumer goods. This is an intentional move by corporations to shelter themselves from pressures to produce goods in anything other than brutal conditions that maximize profit.

I thought of this when reading this article about a person in a Chinese prison camp slipping pleas for help inside the goods the prison produced for export. An Oregon woman found one of them in a package of Halloween decorations. We simply have no idea of knowing what goods are produced under any sort of labor conditions, but especially prison labor. What corporations are directly benefiting from prison labor? At what point do Americans enter into the process? What responsibility do we have to find out? But because of the extreme capital mobility lauded by the political and economic elite for the last fifty years, we simply have almost no way to find out the answers to the questions.

And that’s the way capital likes it.

Father's Day celebrations may have originated in Washington state in the early 20th century, but the United States isn't necessarily the friendliest place for the paterfamilias.

What it means for a country to be good for fathers, of course, differs across time and cultures. But, as we noted last year on Mother's Day, some countries simply prioritize parenting more than others.

When it comes to family-friendly government policies, for instance, there's Scandinavia and then there's the rest of the world. Many of the countries offering the most generous paid paternity leave are Scandinavian, and Norway in particular emerges as arguably the best place in the world to be a father.

Norway is a perennial favorite in best-country lists -- most recently topping the United Nations' Human Development Index -- and it's just as formidable when it comes to fatherhood. Famous for generous parental leave for both sexes - either 46 weeks off at full pay or 56 weeks off at 80 percent of salary (to be divided up between the two parents) -- Norway ensures that new fathers take advantage of the opportunity with its policy of pappapermisjon - a 10-week period of leave reserved exclusively for men. Combine this with two weeks of paid paternity leave carved out for immediately after childbirth, and dads in Norway can look forward to 12 weeks off to spend with their new baby. Ninety percent of Norwegian fathers are now participating in the program, compared with the two to three percent of fathers who were taking parental leave back in the early 1990s, when Norway established its pappapermisjon policy.

Another northern European overachiever is Iceland. Although paid leave policies took a bit of a hit following Iceland's 2008 banking crisis, the country's parliament has since striven to restore what was originally one of the most generous systems in the world. While current Icelandic law provides nine months of paid leave with a 3-3-3 split (three months for mothers, three for fathers, and three to split between parents), by 2016 Iceland will have adopted a 12-month, 5-5-2 system, in which fathers receive five months of paid parental leave, plus an additional two month to be split as the couple sees fit.

If you're searching for that elusive combination of good family policies and stellar Father's Day traditions, it's hard to beat Germany. Like its neighbors to the north, the Father-Friendly Land is no slouch when it comes to parental leave. The government offers 12 months of leave, paid at 67 percent of a parent's salary, to be split between a couple. While there is no leave exclusively reserved for the father, families receive an additional two months of paid leave if the father also takes at least two months off.

But while giving fathers a chance to bond with their newborn babies is nice and all, what really makes Germany great for fathers is the Father's Day party.

Vatertag (also known as Männertag) is celebrated every year on Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter. Originally a religious festival, today Father's Day is a booze-soaked celebration of everything manly. German men of all ages spend the day hiking through town and country pulling large wagons (Bollerwagen) filled with beer or wine (depending on the region), and consuming their precious cargo in large quantities. Der Spiegel warns that people in Germany on Father's Day should expect "grown men slumped against lampposts, or lolling dazed and confused in wooden carts, clutching barrels of beer."

So, who's moving to Germany?

This was a president elected to get us out of conflict in the Middle East, not to enmesh us even further in a cycle of sectarian conflict and metastasizing warfare. This was a president who said he didn’t oppose all wars, just dumb ones. Is there a conceivably dumber war to intervene in than Syria’s current civil one? I can’t see one.

You can forgive a president once – even though his misguided, counter-productive and destabilizing war in Libya was almost as nuts as this latest foray. But by deciding to arm the Sunni radicals fighting the Shiites in Syria and Lebanon, the president has caved to the usual establishment subjects who still want to run or control the entire world. I don’t buy the small arms qualifier. You know that’s the foot in the door to dragging the United States into the middle of a civil war we do not understand and cannot control. If it has any effect, it will be to draw out the conflict still longer and kill more people. More staggeringly, he is planning to put arms into the hands of forces that are increasingly indistinguishable from hardcore Jihadists and al Qaeda – another brutal betrayal of this country’s interests, and his core campaign promise not to start dumb wars. Yep: he is intending to provide arms to elements close to al Qaeda. This isn’t just unwise; it’s close to insane.

What to do when a president just reverses course like this? It comes after verification that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against civilians. This is, apparently, the “red line”. Indiscriminate shelling that kills tens of thousands wasn’t enough. Of course, I’m not in any way defending the horrifying use of these weapons against civilians – but I am asking what on earth is the American national interest in taking sides militarily? I see precisely none. Do we really want to hand over Syria’s chemical arsenal to al Qaeda? Do we really want to pour fuel on the brushfire in the sectarian bloodbath in the larger Middle East? And can you imagine the anger and bitterness against the US that this will entail regardless? We are not just in danger of arming al Qaeda, we are painting a bulls-eye on every city in this country, for some party in that religious struggle to target.

I understand why the Saudis and Jordanians, Sunni bigots and theocrats, want to leverage us into their own sectarian warfare against the Shiites and Alawites. But why should America take sides in such an ancient sectarian conflict? What interest do we possibly have in who wins a Sunni-Shiite war in Arabia?

I hate to say it but this president looks as if he is worse than weak here. He is being dragged around by events and pressures like a rag doll. And this news that we are entering the war with military supplies is provided by Ben Rhodes, not the president. That’s nothing against Ben, but when a president is effectively declaring war, don’t you think he has a duty to tell the American people why and what he intends to achieve?

But nada. You voted twice for Obama? You’re getting the policies of McCain and the Clintons, the candidates he defeated. I wish I could understand this – but, of course, my worry is that the pincer movement of Rice and Power is already pushing us into a war we do not need, and cannot win.

This is worse than a mistake. It’s a betrayal – delivered casually. Maybe he thinks his supporters will treat this declaration of war just as casually. In which case, he’s in for a big surprise.

(Photo: Syrian rebel fighters belonging to the “Martyrs of Maaret al-Numan” battalion leave their position after a range of shootings on June 13, 2013 in the northwestern town of Maaret al-Numan in front of the army base of Wadi Deif, down in the valley. By Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images)

More than two years ago now, Bob Fitch passed away. I was just revisiting one of his last essays, “What is Union Democracy?” The entire thing is worth a read, whether or not you think that Fitch overstates the way in which the internal structures of unions helped fuel the decline of the American labor movement. I personally think he’s more right than wrong.

Here’s one of the strongest passages:

The aim of the Right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict — to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically. Frank Capra’s picture in A Wonderful Life of Bedford Falls under the domination of Mr. Potter illustrates the way small town politics usually works. The aim of conservative urban politics is to create small towns in the big city: the local patronage machines run by the Floyd Flakes and the Pedro Espadas.

The genuine Left, of course, seeks exactly the opposite. Not to democratize the machines from within but to defeat them by extending scope of conflict: breaking down local boundaries; nationalizing and even internationalizing class action and union representation. As political scientist E.E. Schattschneider wrote a generation ago: “The scope of labor conflict is close to the essence of the controversy.” What were the battles about industrial and craft unionism; industry wide bargaining sympathy strikes, he asked, but efforts to determine “Who can get into the fight and who is excluded?”

A young reader suggests not-so-much:

I have to disagree with the outrage of your readers (and the general Internet masses) on the impact of the NSA data collection.  I think everyone needs to come to grips with the realities of the Internet.  It is an enormously useful tool and information exchange that is kept free and open, as it should be.  It is not an extension of your private space.  The government collects data on what you do and say on the Internet?  No shit.  Private companies do too, as do hackers, foreign governments, and basically anyone who is good at googling.

Several months ago I googled a Boston hotel to get the address of where my girlfriend’s parents were staying.  For months adverts for the hotel popped up on most sites I visited.  When I google addresses with generic street names the one in my city always comes up first, probably because of the location of my IP address.  Information on the Internet is open and there for the taking, and if you are worried about your emails being read maybe all the examples of leaked emails by persons who received them, hackers, etc. should send a jolt of reality through your system.

Look, using technology and the Internet is ingrained in our lives but remains completely optional and discretionary.  And if you say “Wrong, I need this to live” then you should be worried about more than just having your metadata mined.  We have fought hard (and rightfully, I think) to keep the Internet as an open and free forum.  If you say or do something in an open and free forum, it is out there for the taking.  Plan your actions accordingly.  You don’t NEED to tweet, google, email, instant message, or post anything you don’t want to be known.  And quite frankly if you are over-sharing your life and secrets on the Internet, I feel sorry for you.

By the way, I am 26 and far from the only millennial who I know feels this way.  So we should not assume that the proliferation of private information available for the taking is going to be permanent.

Another adds:

Like you, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed with Snowden.  I’ve been trying to figure out why it doesn’t bother me, but I suppose it’s because this is just the latest in a long line of surveillance activity colliding with modern technology.  I’m sure you remember the big deal that was the ECHELON program, right? There was a right-wing kerfuffle on this being an invasion of privacy during the Clinton administration.  What set it apart from Bush’s warrantless wiretapping was that it adhered to FISA.  But ECHELON was still “capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links.”

PRISM is just a step further out from ECHELON.  It’s using anonymous data collection (just like Google, Yahoo, Amazon or any other place that monitors your internet searching activities) before going to get a warrant for suspicious activity.  You can think of this as an invasion of privacy, or that there’s a camera on you in any grocery store, one from which the feds can ask for footage, if so inclined.

I grok the concerns of civil libertarians like Greenwald.  It’s just a creepy feeling (if the federal government really wanted to, they could connect a few dots and find out my taste in internet porn).  It may be lawful, but imagine how easy it would be to abuse.  That’s worth discussing. But it’s not worth pretending to be shocked (shocked!) that your Internet searches don’t just disappear into the ether.  They call it “being on the grid” for a reason.

Conor Friedersdorf posts this chart, and shifts the debate to what seems to me more productive ground. The great opportunity of this moment is to start a debate about how we tackle terrorism as 9/11 gets more distant in the rear-side mirror, as we absorb the fact that the last decade has been far more terror-free than the decade before 9/11, when many of us thought we were living in an elysian fin de siecle. Now may be the moment, in other words, to examine the entire premise of Imaginationland.

Conor argues that “Americans would never welcome a secret surveillance state to reduce diabetes deaths, or gun deaths, or drunk driving deaths by 3,000 per year.” Barro hopes the NSA story will increase pushback against the post-9/11 mindset:

We don’t think about other social ills this way. Nobody says we should have a goal of zero heart disease deaths or zero auto accident deaths, because that would be nuts. We balance the objective of saving lives against other considerations, like cost and individual rights and the fact that bacon is delicious. We should apply this cost-benefit approach to terrorism too. This approach would allow us to say that the phone records dragnet can be a bad idea even if it saves lives. But the big resistance to that analysis doesn’t come from Congress; it comes from the American public.

And the trouble is: you wouldn’t know that from Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian or the NYT editorial board, would you? And yet this is the core issue. Without public support, this war cannot be unwound. Matt Steinglass compares the War on Terror to the Vietnam War:

[C]onventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that’s not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy. The chief threat it poses is not to the lives of American citizens but to the direction of American policy and the electoral prospects of American politicians. A major strike in America by a jihadist terrorist group in 2012 would have done little damage to America, but it could have posed a serious problem for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It’s no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack.

If this contretemps prompts an actual discussion about whether we now need any sort of serious counter-terrorism policy (and anything serious would include searching huge databases for patterns), great. So lets have that debate. Are we now safe enough to end these programs? Are we finally saying we’d be fine with a terror attack that could have been foiled earlier because we prefer that only private businesses collect this kind of Big Data? Are we prepared to back a president who puts liberty before security – especially in the wake of a mass casualty event?

I think Conor has put his finger on the core issue here.

The trouble is that the only way to find out empirically whether the threat is massively over-stated is to reveal intelligence that perforce has to be secret. There is a genuine trap here. But it could be one in which the administration offers some serious answers. Instead of being entirely reactive, the president should make the case for the necessity of this system, and give us the actual trade-offs involved. I’m for transparency in most things; but I’m not so utopian as to believe that our society can function without some government – and personal and corporate – secrecy.

So instead of polarizing on this, lets debate it. Is Jihadist terrorism an overblown threat? If it is, unwind the apparatus slowly. If it isn’t, is this program better or worse than the practical alternatives? If we are not to occupy foreign countries (dumb) or torture prisoners (dumb and evil) or take out Jihadists by drones (increasingly counter-productive), isn’t mass data gathering about as anodyne a remedy for this ill as you can find?

Given people’s intensity over this issue, I’m probably going to be annoyed by the response to this. But while all the NSA stuff and destruction of privacy is in fact terrible and deeply disturbing, it has about 0.1% as much effect on people’s freedom, security, and quality of life as unemployment, economic inequality, destruction of unions, and household debt, not to mention racism, sexism, homophobia, and climate change. If we saw 1% of the outrage over these things as over the relatively abstract (although not unreal) notion of a government spying on us, we’d be getting somewhere.

Istanbul, Turkey, 10.02 am

Tim Grierson compares the latest Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn vehicle to “watching two aging fraternity brothers try to convince each other that they haven’t lost a step since college”:

If the movie was just the two guys hanging out, The Internship might have been enjoyable. But Vaughn has put them into a really creaky underdog tale that’s part Animal House, part Revenge of the Nerds, and a large part “Homer Goes to College”—The Simpsons episode where Homer has to hang out with a bunch of smart, nerdy college kids and teaches them how to have some fun. That setup makes The Internship sound like a raucous comedy, but unlike Wedding Crashers, which was rated R, this PG-13 offering is actually pretty tame, no matter how many “shit”s the characters get away with saying. …

As for the Google setting and downsized-America topicality, the movie actually takes it seriously, hoping it’ll give the movie some emotional resonance. But according to The Internship, Billy and Nick are meant to represent all of us, the aging workers scared about an uncertain future in which we’ll be replaced by brainiac millennials who are too busy on their iPhones to, like, experience life, man, and get laid.

For A.A. Dowd, “it’s enough to make a lifelong Googler want to switch to Bing”:

Product placement is one thing; building a whole movie around the glorification of a multinational corporation is something else entirely.

Essentially a feature-length sponsored post, The Internship casts Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as middle-aged salesmen who find themselves competing against braniac college kids for a job at Google. As the film incessantly reminds viewers, the company—envisioned here as a professional paradise, where the food is free, diversity is key, and cars drive themselves—is regularly voted the greatest place to work in America. Characters go further, describing it as an “engine for change,” the “Garden of Eden,” and “the best amusement park you’ve ever been to, times a million.” If this excessively flattering farce is to be believed, Googliness is next to godliness.

Lydia DePillis has more on the corporate propaganda:

As the Los Angeles Times reported recently, Google charged neither location nor licensing fees for the privilege of shooting at its edenic headquarters, but did enjoy veto power over its contents. Accordingly, the script fully buys into the company mystique: Intern teams competing for full-time jobs are told they’ll be judged on their “Googliness,” which one character describes as “the intangible stuff that made a search engine into an engine for doing good.” And when Wilson’s love interest, a workaholic middle manager, says she puts in long hours because she thinks her job “makes peoples lives just a little bit better,” we’re clearly supposed to admire her.

The film’s advertorial nature hasn’t gone unnoticed. Early reviews have focused on the movie’s all-encompassing product placement, the Googleplex perks it highlights, and how it could be useful recruiting tool. (One critic even went so far as to suggest tickets to the movie, since it’s one long advertisement, should be given away for free.) It’s all true: In the world of The Internship, Google is basically paradise, the pinnacle of modernity and meaning in work. No wonder the company’s head of HR is so happy with it.

Previous Dish on the movie’s extreme product placement here.

When a Supreme Court majority wants to reach an outcome but the argument on behalf of said outcome is particularly indefensible, it’s likely that the opinion will be handed off to Anthony Kennedy, like radioactive waste. Today’s task for Kennedy was to hold that suspicionless searches without exigent circumstances could be consistent with the Fourth Amendment, and his opinion was exactly the atrocity you’d expect. His approach was to claim that DNA samples were taken from a suspect not for investigatory purposes but for identification, an argument that’s ridiculous on its face and even less tenable when you look at the facts. Since it was a Fourth Amendment case Scalia voted correctly, but Breyer and Thomas joined with the Court’s more consistent authoritarians to swing the case to the dark side.

Read the whole etc., but I’d also like to highlight the conclusion of Scalia’s unanswerable dissent:

Today’s judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone who flies on an air plane (surely the Transportation Security Administration needs to know the “identity” of the flying public), applies for a driver’s license, or attends a public school. Perhaps the construction of such a genetic panopticon is wise. But I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.

I therefore dissent, and hope that today’s incursion upon the Fourth Amendment, like an earlier one, will some day be repudiated.

I would rather focus on our values and liberty than those of “the proud men” who wrote the Bill of Rights, but otherwise this is completely right. If this decision stands, we might as well just collect DNA samples from everyone at birth and be done with the pretense that we’re applying the Fourth Amendment to DNA collection. The originalist language is useful, though, because it highlights what a particular embarrassment it was for Thomas to have joined Kennedy’s opinion without comment. I’d love to hear the “originalist” justification for the proposition that you can conduct a search of one’s body without suspicion (let alone warrant) or exigent circumstances as long as the information collected is really useful.

Branded cigarettes have made far fewer appearances on screen since tobacco product placement on TV and in movies was banned in 1998:

Alyssa suspects that alcohol would be more resilient:

Even if cigarettes became a model, and all of the vice industries were banned from paying for product placement in entertainment, I suspect the relatively heavy inclusion of alcohol in movies would continue, if only as a way to signal the characters are adults, and as real men, they drink beer, or as real women, they drink some sort of lady-approved cocktail (or, if cool, brown liquor). The social capital of alcohol remains high enough for it to be a useful signifier. And maybe instead of wanting to get all product placement out, we should be more concerned with getting certain kinds in more prominently. I could stand to see Trojan get some free advertising, for example, if movies could be persuaded that it’s as important to show couples using birth control once they get in to bed as it is to show them drinking to prove their grown-up and gender bona fides on their way to the bedroom.

Ah, yes, what every movie-goer really wants: more condom visuals.

James Pethokoukis at NRO agrees with me on the need to simplify the tax code without necessarily flattening it:

It’s an elegant, compelling model that might work splendidly if you were creating a tax code ex nihilo. Flat-tax fever swept across Eastern and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War, when finally independent nations were rebuilding their own economies, and the model has been quite successful, for the most part.

America, however, is in a much different place. Millions of individuals and businesses have made long-term plans based on expectations that the tax code will remain more or less the same. Half the nation, thanks to all those deductions and credits, pays no income tax. And, perhaps most important, an aging population means that the cost of health-care entitlements will grow rapidly, even if health-care inflation slows.

Adding that flat taxes are consistently unpopular with voters, Pethokoukis thinks through some other options:

One solution is to take the essentially flat consumption tax devised by economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka and give it a progressive rate structure. Or we could combine a consumption tax with a flat income tax on wealthier Americans, as suggested by Yale’s Michael Graetz. Both ideas are also flexible enough give needed tax relief to parents. (Call it a “human-capital gains” tax cut.)

The flat tax embodies pro-growth, supply-side principles that are great starting points for tax reform, but it shouldn’t be the destination.

Harold Pollack writes that “this may be the most embarrassing graph in the history of drug control policy”:

Law enforcement strategies have utterly failed to even maintain street prices of the key illicit substances. Street drug prices in the [above] figure fell by roughly a factor of five between 1980 and 2008. Meanwhile the number of drug offenders locked up in our jails and prisons went from fewer than 42,000 in 1980 to a peak of 562,000 in 2007.