kurtadb

America’s most famous socialist might be more electable than he looks.

In the swing state of Iowa, according to the latest poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, Bernie Sanders leads Donald Trump by 5 points and trails Jeb Bush by just 2 points. In purple New Hampshire, likewise, Sanders leads Trump by 10 points, and is tied against Bush. By contrast, both Trump and Bush lead Hillary Clinton—the presumptive Democratic nominee—in Iowa, and Bush stands ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire by 7 points.

This comes after a national Quinnipiac survey last month showed Sanders similarly competitive nationally with the most visible Republican presidential candidates: He tied Bush with 44 percent, led Trump by a margin of 47 percent to 42 percent, and barely trailed Carly Fiorina, 44 percent to 43 percent. In each instance, other than against Fiorina, Clinton performed worse. In other words, if Sanders had an electability gap with Hillary, he’s closed it.

Of course, there are caveats. At this point in an election, head-to-head polls gauge sympathy and feeling; they can’t predict an outcome. We don’t know how Sanders would look in a national campaign, against a unified Republican Party. Likewise, when it comes to Clinton’s weakness, we don’t know how she would look if she were the nominee. Given her place in the national Democratic primary—a solid, double-digit lead over Sanders—there’s a chance that her poor numbers reflect ambivalence from potential supporters, not outright opposition. Which is just to say that, to many Americans, the 2016 presidential election is still hypothetical, and when you ask them to choose between candidates, you’re asking for a gut reaction more than a considered choice.

But that’s not to dismiss Sanders. Even if his base—college-educated workers and liberal whites—reflects the extent to which he occupies a traditional left-wing role that has appeared in past Democratic presidential primaries, it’s meaningful that a self-described “democratic socialist” on the periphery of American politics is tied in two swing states with a man who has the same last name as two former presidents. Nor should anyone ignore the massive crowds that flock to every major Sanders campaign event; on Saturday, 20,000 people came to the Boston Convention Center to hear the senator speak, one of the largest presidential primary crowds ever assembled in Massachusetts.

Indeed, there’s evidence that Sanders’ appeal might go beyond liberals. Writing for the Washington Post, David Weigel found a friendly reception for the Vermont senator in working-class West Virginia, where white Democratic voters rejected Barack Obama in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

In Morgantown, home to West Virginia University, a 62-year old activist named Andy Cockburn went to an early organizing meeting for Clinton and found only 10 other people. In July, when Morgantown hosted one of several hundred Sanders house parties, more than 100 people packed a bar basement and started organizing. […]

“The whole feeling is that the parties have left the people,” said Doug Epling, a 73-year old businessman in Beckley with close ties to West Virginia’s elected Democrats. “We do need help from the federal government. Sanders is the only one that’s offered anything that I’ve heard.”

Yes, this is anecdotal, which makes it impossible to extrapolate to the broader general election contest. It’s possible that, outside the contours of a Democratic primary race, Sanders’ left-wing views will alienate white working-class voters. But if you take all the anecdotes and information together, you begin to see the outlines of a “Sanders coalition” in the Democratic Party: Predominantly white, with a connection to the white working class, and forged around core economic concerns. If durable, it’s the kind of coalition that could force Hillary Clinton into a more serious contest for votes, if not delegates.

There are a couple of takeaways from this early dynamic. First, if Sanders is ahead in early primary states, it’s because of men. In Iowa, as of a mid-September poll from YouGov and CBS News, Sanders led Clinton by 18 points among men, compared to just 5 points among women. In New Hampshire, noted the same survey, Sanders led Clinton by a whopping 38 points among men. And in a recent national poll from CNN, Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden combine for 53 percent of the male Democratic vote, to Clinton’s 34 percent. It’s possible that, if Sanders can build a durable coalition for the primary, it will center on moderate and liberal men more than any other demographic group. If Sanders and Clinton continue on their respective trajectories, then the 2016 Democratic primary may fracture on gender in more dramatic ways than it did in 2008.

Second, it’s not clear that Sanders could carry his coalition into a general election. After two terms of Barack Obama and two elections driven by nonwhite voters, the Democratic Party is fully tied to minority voters. As we’ve seen in those elections—as well as in state and local contests across the country—this makes it hard to extend the Democratic coalition to white voters, and working-class whites in particular. Bernie Sanders the Democratic outsider might win with working-class whites, especially those estranged from the GOP. But Bernie Sanders the Democratic standard-bearer—backed by a heavily black and Latino coalition—may have a much harder time.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.

There was a time, from the late 1990s to the mid–2000s or so, when Jim O’Rourke sat at the center of a peculiar intersection of experimental, indie rock, and…

There are two truths about gun homicide in America.

The first is that we have a mass shooting problem. On Thursday, 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on a community college campus in Roseburg, Oregon. He killed 9 people and wounded 7 others—allegedly singling out Christian students—before he was killed in a shootout with police.* “Roseburg” joins “Charleston, “Isla Vista,” “Newtown,” “Aurora,” and “Oak Creek” on the long list of small towns and quiet cities marred by horrific gun violence.

It’s one reason President Obama was visibly angry in his brief remarks on the shooting. This, after all, was another address to give to another shattered community with another set of grieving families. “[A]s I said just a few months ago, and I said a few months before that, and I said each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough,” said Obama. “[I]t does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America—next week, or a couple of months from now.” He continued: “This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

And it’s too many families. Under the broad definition used by ShootingTracker.com, no calendar week during Obama’s second term has passed without a mass shooting incident. In the 274 days between the first of the year and the beginning of October, there were 294 mass shootings, claiming hundreds of lives. Before Roseburg, it was Roanoke, Virginia. Before Ronaoke it was Lafayette, Louisiana. And so on.

Highly visible, these shootings are the focal point for most of our national conversation on gun control. The last serious legislation for universal background checks came just after the murder of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adult staff members at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, which resulted in national calls for new action. (It died in the Senate at the hands of a GOP-led and blue-dog Democrat–supported filibuster.) But as much as the attention makes sense, it also obscures that second truth about gun homicides in America: Ending mass shootings won’t solve the problem.

Between 2009 and 2013, 44,077 people were murdered with guns, according to the FBI. Just a fraction of those came from Roseburg-style incidents. Many more were domestic violence against women. But the large majority involved the deaths of men, and of those, most involved poor black Americans in inner cities and other marginalized areas. “From 1980 to 2013, 262,000 black males were killed in America,” writes Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic. In general, when we talk about gun homicide in the United States, we are largely talking about violence between poor black men.

Too many observers treat this as intractable problem, a product of pathologies and indifference. “[Obama] also should have spent 15 minutes on training the [black] community to stop killing each other,” said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani after President Obama spoke on Ferguson last year. But there is no pathology or uniquely black problem. Like most social problems, high homicide rates in poor black communities—“black-on-black crime”—are a product of specific, contingent inputs: “[s]egregation, economic isolation, and the flawed workings of American criminal justice,” writes journalist Jill Leovy in Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.

Segregation forces intimacy and creates conflict, while economic isolation leads to illegal markets—like the drug trade—where there is no legal recourse for disputes. These, by themselves, are conditions under which homicide flares. But there’s also the particular history of segregated black communities and law enforcement. For most of America’s post-Emancipation history, officials were indifferent to violence against blacks, either from whites or from other blacks. “When people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other,” says Leovy. Taken together, these conditions breed violence, which is why black homicide rates have always been higher than ones for whites. (Or why, to move away from race, the American frontier was defined by its violence—isolation with desperation and without strong legal authority equals homicide.)

To all of that, add guns. Patchwork gun laws within and between states means there’s no way to keep guns out of a given area. Chicago, for instance, has strict gun laws. But surrounding counties and states don’t. Cheap firearms—through theft, illegal sales, or extended networks of legal buyers—make their way into the city, where they’re used for crime. And while guns don’t necessarily cause violence, they (predictably) increase the lethality of conflicts, causing more deaths.

Put simply, our focus on Roseburg-style shootings—as much it makes sense—obscures the extent to which most victims of gun homicide are poor, black, and live in America’s most isolated communities. Moreover, the steps we could take to reduce those homicides—removing millions of handguns from circulation, preventing illegal sales, reforming police departments to solve more homicides (and deter potential shooters)—don’t have much to do with ending mass shootings. Likewise, the steps to reduce mass shootings—universal background checks, stronger mental health services, liability insurance for gun owners—won’t do much to reduce the nation’s gun homicide problem (although it could reduce our other gun problem—suicides).

Here, it’s tempting to quip about the lack of black faces in our gun conversations and how America isn’t energized—or seemingly interested—in bringing its wealth and power to bear on the problems of inner cities. But, as Obama made clear in his Thursday remarks, Americans aren’t prepared to do anything against gun violence, period. We’re not just captive to broken systems and implacable opposition; we’re either paralyzed in the face of one kind of atrocity or blind to another, much more common one.

See more of Slate’s coverage of the Oregon shooting.

*Correction, Oct. 2, 2015: This article originally misstated that Chris Harper Mercer killed 10 people in the attacks. (Return.)

Sports Authority Field at Mile High will have a Bud Light Twitter vending machine. (Doug Pensinger, Getty Images)The Broncos will unveil a new toy at Sports Authority Field on Sunday when they

Before the Reagans cranked up the War on Drugs in the early 80s due to the massive influx of cocaine from Latin America, advertisements offering all kinds of coke paraphernalia could be found in magazines. The World's Best Ever collected a bunch of ads offering spoons, mirrors, straws, knives, and the like for America's coke sniffers.

I am an episode and a half into Narcos on Netflix. Pretty good (but not great) so far.¹ (via adfreak)

1. They should have found a way to do it without the voiceover. Too much telling and not enough showing. (I have a thing about voiceovers. My first exposure to Blade Runner was Ridley Scott's Director's Cut, which omitted Deckard's voiceover, and when I started watching the original version on TV a few months ago, I nearly threw the remote through the screen...so grating and entirely unnecessary.)↩

Tags: advertising   Blade Runner   cocaine   drugs   movies

Death to Kettle Sours T-shirt (Photo from http://teespring.com)A small battle has erupted in the craft beer world over one of the hottest styles of beers -- sours.

“Why You Hate Google’s New Logo,” by Sarah Larson (September 3rd) Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY At the Forty-second Street F station, in…

North America’s highest peak, formerly known as Mount McKinley, will now go by its older, First Nations name. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL BRIDGES / THE LIFE…

By Barry Cunliffe, due out in November.  I’m counting the days…

USPS mail carrier J.B. Dillon sorts mail to be delivered to customers on his Longmont route.

This sounds cool. Max Ehrenfreund writes today about Gary Bishop, a research engineer at the University of Denver, who has been working on real-life emissions testing for cars:

Bishop's laboratory has developed a roadside sensor, which he and his colleagues have been using for more than a decade to see how cars actually do on the street in several major cities....Authorities are now using the sensors in and around Denver and in a few other states as a supplement to conventional testing. The state sets up the sensors at highway on-ramps and elsewhere along the road. Drivers don't stop. They just roll between two rows of cones while a camera records the car's license plate and the equipment registers the emissions from the tailpipe, and go on their way. If a car produces at least two passing grades, the driver is spared the trip to the inspection station.

How about that. Can we get this in California, please? Of course, there's also this:

One of the cities where Bishop has worked is Tulsa, Okla., where emissions tests have never been required. The group has found that emissions from the cars in Tulsa are no worse than emissions in other cities where standards are enforced.

That's true. In a 2007 paper, Bishop concluded that emissions reductions have been about the same everywhere he's tested, regardless of whether periodic inspections are required. So maybe we need to ditch the big-government regulations that mandate the inspection regime altogether. Instead we could rely on spot checks of real-world emissions as a way of holding auto manufacturers accountable for complying with EPA standards, which suddenly seems like it might be the real problem after all. Let's get Jeb Bush on this.

Earlier I went out to retrieve my mail, and when I was passing through the carport, I noticed what looked like a GIANT SNAKE TAIL dangling down from a loose spot in the soffit that lines the carport roof. On the walk to the mailbox, I half convinced myself I was just seeing things, but nope, there it was when I came back by, so I got a picture:

The soffit was kind of bulging downward a little where the GIANT SNAKE BODY must be nestled. While I watched in horror, it slithered toward the center, and I saw its awful, scaly tail disappear. I ran inside and slammed and locked the door. But I know it’s out there.

I sent the picture to my husband and implored him to come home right away to rip down the soffit and remove the beast. And to bring lots of bourbon! But he says I’m overreacting and that it’s probably just a “harmless” little black snake that has “beneficial” properties.

Just how harmless will it be when it plops down on my head next time I leave the house and causes me to slam into the side of my vehicle as I attempt to run away in fright, resulting in extensive body work for both me and the car? Will that be beneficial, considering that we’re covered for restorative plastic surgery only?

Goddamn it. I’m tired of these motherfucking snakes in my motherfucking carport. Open thread.

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As head of Rowdy Mermaid Kombucha, Jamba Dunn said he has to contend constantly with a potent blend of chemistry and bureaucracy that threatens to sink his business.

(via @dens)

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So what's the incident that will finally send Donald Trump back to his mansion to mope about not being president? I mean, the guy seems invulnerable. And he's certainly survived a stupendous number of gaffes that would have killed anyone else.

But his latest howler at a town hall in New Hampshire—especially after his weak debate performance last night—might finally be his death knell. Note: The issue isn't the questioner. There are lunatics in every crowd. This one declared, "We have a problem in this country: It's called Muslims....They have training camps growing where they want to kill us." Then he asked, "When do we get rid of them?" Did he mean all the Muslims? Just the fantasy training camps? Who knows. But all Trump said was this: "We're going to be looking at a lot of different things." No pushback, no nothing. I'm sure he'll be walking this back soon, but it might be unwalkable. If there's any justice, this might finally do him in.

DURANGO, Colo. (AP) — A 36-year-old Boulder man who rode his mountain unicycle along the 500-mile Colorado Trail says he decided partway through to dedicate the trip to raising money for

Fuck all of you in that rotten shithole.

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Here's the latest from the Vatican:

Pope Francis announced new procedures on Tuesday to make it easier for Roman Catholics to obtain marriage annulments, a change intended to streamline a process long criticized by many Catholics as too cumbersome, complicated and expensive.

Under the new rules, the process will be much faster for cases in which a couple is not contesting the annulment.

Such cases had required two separate judgments from a diocesan tribunal. Now, the process, overseen by local bishops, will require only one judgment. Moreover, the new rules require that the hearing process be held within 30 days of application, eliminating a longer waiting period.

Obviously, this is fine with me. But it's difficult to understand theologically. The Bible contains virtually nothing on the subject of abortion, and yet the church considers it a grave sin. Conversely, Jesus could hardly be clearer about his disapproval of divorce, and yet the church is making divorce easier.¹ Aside from the fact that men often want divorces, while abortion is limited to women, what accounts for this?

¹And let's hear no nonsense about annulment being different from divorce. Even church leaders admit that there's usually little substantive difference.

Apropos of my suggested response this morning to the most obnoxious kinds of gotcha questions, David Bailey writes in comments:

Recommended answer: "Oh, go fuck yourself."

This is off-topic, and I may not be the first to bring it up, but it seems as if Kevin's posts have been a bit saltier recently. I have a hard time believing he would have written this a year ago.

Not complaining or criticizing, but I just thought it was interesting.

Come on. This was an homage to Dick Cheney, people! Do our schools teach nothing these days?

But am I, in fact, using the word fuck more often than in the past? This is surprisingly difficult to get a handle on. The problem is that my readers are all such potty mouths. According to Google, there have been 6,330 F-bombs on this blog since its move to Mother Jones, but as near as I can tell, 6,314 of them have been from commenters. Still, that leaves 16 for me. Let's tot them up.

It turns out that David is right: I've already set a new personal best this year. At my current rate I'll double my previous most obscene year (2010). The deeply researched chart on the right tells the tale, and as a personal favor to Swami Bhut Jolokia, I've even labeled the y-axis.

In my defense, I should point out that this total represents only about 0.15 percent of my blog posts, an average of just a bit over two per year. Not bad! What's more, many of those were quotes of illustrious public servants like Dick Cheney. Still, I admit that if it were solely up to me these numbers would be far higher. However, (a) I know that casual F-bombs can put people off, and (b) my mother reads this blog. So I try to stay family-friendly most of the time.

I’ve spent the past few days reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and posting about it on Facebook. Rather than rewriting those posts as a single piece here, I thought I’d take some screen shots, and share them with some additional commentary. A shout-out to my friend Lizzie Donahue, whose queries to me on our daily walk this morning prompted the last and lengthiest post.

Here’s the first post.

And here’s a short addendum to this post, where I comment further on the theme of education and Coates’s discussion of his time at Howard University.

I say here that breaking with the mytho-poetic view of a heroic African past was the second great trauma of Coates’s life. I should be more precise. I mean disillusionment. But it was a disillusionment that was immensely productive. More than the loss of a specific view of things, the break with black nationalism made Coates suspicious of all master narratives, all collective platforms of totality. As an alternative, he turned to the specificity and concreteness of poetry, “of small hard things,” as he says: “aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars.” And in that specificity “I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power.” The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.” This is a writer for whom the struggle to see what is in front of his nose is a lifelong effort, a hard-won right to see things as they are, without mediation or adornment or chastising authority. So much so that it has made him, as we’ll see, suspicious of all collectivities, all platforms.

One other note on education. Coates has a wonderful passage on translation as living. He goes to Europe for the first time, lands in Geneva, heads for the train station, and here’s what he says:

I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.

That passage reminded me of this exchange between Peter Cole, the poet and translator, and Joshua Cohen, the author in The Paris Review:

Cole: People say such dumb things about translation.

Cohen: Such as?

Cole: Such as that, unlike so-called original composition, it’s always a matter of compromise, of negotiation—that translation is inevitably a failed approximation, or like a black-and-white photograph rather than color. But what in life that’s valuable over time doesn’t involve negotiation or intelligent compromise? Where does friendship come from? Or marriage? Education? Commerce? A culture? Would you colorize Stieglitz? And who says that original composition is fundamentally different from translation? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett isn’t talking about translation there, he’s talking about life, or writing, period. Poetry isn’t lost in translation, it is translation. It’s lost only in bad or gray translation—and in the mindless repetition of the thin figures of speech we use to talk about it.

…

Cole: You have to be desperate, at some level, to write anything, no? To move the magic of consciousness and language from one state or place to another. From an itch or an instinct to a line of poetry, and from that line of poetry to the next one, and from these two in combination to a third, and then to a reader. Translation as we normally think of it only raises all that to a higher exponential power. So, yes, there’s desperation, but even more so, at least for me, there’s desire—for nourishment and for pleasure. Translation isn’t some weakly technical craft. It’s a deeply human activity, an essential part of the art of our lives, whether we’re aware of it as such or not. Of course it exists in relation to something, not on its own, and so we think of it as secondary, but hey, so do we exist only in relation to something, as inheritors and animators or deadeners of traditions of all sorts. But that’s my stump speech—deep translation.

Here’s the second post I wrote, on the surprising atheism of Coates’ book.

In re-reading this, I’m reminded of something else I wanted to say. In the last several decades, intellectuals of a pragmatist bent have often affirmed a kind of politics of struggle amid the ruins of God, Marx, and other master narratives. Think Cornel West. What strikes me in reading Coates, though, is just how visceral and personal and punch-in-the-gut powerful the death of God is for him. There’s a moment near the end of the book where he looks at the photographs of civil rights protester, and he asks his son:

Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debts later.

There’s nothing easy or cheap or distant about this atheism. Coates is fully aware of its costs: not just personal—the existential agony of the unbeliever—but also political: “I thought of my own distance from an institution [the black church] that has, so often, been the only support for our people.” And he’s still willing to pay them. Because he has no other choice. One cannot compel belief, whether it’s in God or the revolution. This is why I’ve been slightly discomfited by the critiques of Coates that take him to task for his political fatalism. In part because I don’t think that’s quite accurate, as we’ll see below, but also because I don’t know that you can will someone to believe in something they don’t believe.

And here we come to the third post, broken up into two screenshots.

By way of qualification, as Joel Scott Rutstein pointed out to me on Facebook, I should acknowledge that throughout the book, Coates deploys an arresting phrase: the people who believe themselves to be white. Every time I read that, I was indeed brought up short.

Update, 3 pm

Dammit, I meant to include these in my post but forgot. Tressie McMillan Cottom has one of the very few posts that grapple with Coates’s atheism. It’s very smart, though I disagree with her, I think, on the question of the political fallout. Her post led me to this, by Robert Greene, which I also thought quite smart, on the dangers of asking or reading Coates to be a writer other than he is.

The Wolfpack is a documentary that follows the six Angulo brothers, whose father kept them sequestered (along with their sister and mother) inside a four-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for fourteen years because he thought the city unsafe, allowing only annual or semi-annual trips outside. The boys' only access to the outside world was through movies, which they recreated in their tiny apartment. The trailer:

With no friends and living on welfare, they feed their curiosity, creativity, and imagination with film, which allows them to escape from their feelings of isolation and loneliness. Everything changes when one of the brothers escapes, and the power dynamics in the house are transformed. The Wolfpack must learn how to integrate into society without disbanding the brotherhood.

They did not mess around when it came to their filmmaking...this is a surprisingly realistic Batman costume made out of cereal boxes and yoga mats:

The Wolfpack won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, and the brothers made a few videos to thank the festival for their prize. Here are the Clerks and The Usual Suspects thank yous:

They also filmed a scene from one of their favorite movies of 2014, The Grand Budapest Hotel:

The Wolfpack was out in US theaters earlier this summer and is now on Amazon Instant...I think I'm going to watch this tonight. (via @quinto_quarto)

Tags: Batman   Clerks   movies   The Grand Budapest Hotel   The Usual Suspects   The Wolfpack   trailers   video

Ed Kilgore on the conservative hostility toward illegal immigration:

This very weekend I was reading an advance copy of an upcoming book that includes the results of some intensive focus group work with what might be called the "angry wing" of the GOP base. The author notes that one thing that simply enrages grass-roots conservatives is the use of non-English languages by immigrants.

Yep. You can read all about it from one of Kilgore's predecessors, who wrote about it during our last big try at immigration reform in 2006. It's based on an excellent piece by Chris Hayes, written before he sold out to the bright lights and big paychecks of cable television.

I agree that language is probably the key original driver of anti-immigrant sentiment, though it's long since inspired further animus based around crime, gangs, social services, and other culture-related issues. The odd thing is that this is one of the few areas where I think the anti-immigrationists have a bit of a point. It's not a very big point, since (a) Spanish occupies no official role in the United States, and (b) Latin American immigrants all end up speaking English by the second and third generations anyway. Hell, the third-generation Latino who speaks lousy Spanish is practically a cliche.

That said, I've long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity. The Swiss manage, but the whole reason they're famous for it is because it's so unusual. Even the Belgians and Canadians have trouble with it, and they're pretty tolerant people.

Would a congressional declaration that English is the official language of the United States do anything to calm anti-immigrant fervor? At this point, probably not. But if it were written narrowly and carefully, I'd probably support it. I figure that if God considered a single common language such a boon that it threatened his dominion, it must be pretty powerful stuff.

Great news! Sarah Palin will be interviewing Donald Trump at 10 p.m. Eastern on her brand new show, On Point, which started Monday and airs on the One America News network. It will be the greatest, classiest, rogue-iest interview ever!

Wait. What's that? You don't get OAN on your cable system? Me neither. Bummer. Maybe it'll be on Palin's Facebook page eventually.

What makes this whole thing a little weirder than even the normal Palin weirdness is that she announced her upcoming interview with a standard-issue blast on the lamestream media for asking Trump a gotcha question about his favorite Bible verse. "By the way," she writes, "even with my reading scripture everyday I wouldn't want to answer the guy's question either... it's none of his business; it IS personal." What makes this weird is that Palin has been happy to talk about this before. For example, in this interview:

In dealing with her daily challenges, Palin leans on the Bible verse that says, “God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and might and a sound mind.”

That's 2 Timothy 1:7 (close enough, anyway), and Palin has mentioned it on other occasions too. It really does seem to be one of her favorites. So why is this suddenly so personal that she doesn't think anyone should have to talk about it? Are we now all keeping our favorite Bible verses a deeply held secret?

Over at National Review, Charles Cooke writes about the gruesome murder of WDBJ reporters Alison Parker and Adam Ward on Wednesday:

As I have written over and over again during the last few years, I do not believe that we can learn a great deal from the justifications that are forwarded by public killers....Mine, however, is not the only view out there. Indeed, there is a sizeable contingent within the United States that takes the question of what murderers purport to believe extremely seriously indeed. It is because of these people that we had to examine “toxic masculinity” in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting....[etc.]

....Half-joking on Twitter, the Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch reacted to this news by observing that, “instead of going on a killing spree, this guy should’ve gotten a columnist gig at the Guardian.” As with all humor, there is some truth at the root of this barb....For what reason is this guy exempt? Why do we not need to have a “national conversation” about hypersensitivity?

The answer, I imagine, is politics, for this instinct seems only to run one way.

Generally speaking, I agree with Cooke. Crazy people are always going to find something to justify their worldview, and they're going to find it somewhere out in the real world. The fact that any particular crazy person decides to have it in for the IRS or Greenpeace or women who laughed at him in high school doesn't mean a lot. It only becomes meaningful if some particular excuse starts showing up a lot. Beyond that, I even agree that the culture of hypersensitivity has gotten out of hand in some precincts of the left.

That said....is Cooke kidding? This instinct only runs one way? After the Columbine massacre in 1999, Newt Gingrich denounced the "liberal political elite" for "being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done." Conservatives have been raising Cain about the pernicious effects of Hollywood liberalism, video games, and the decline of religion for decades. Hysteria about the counterculture and liberal moral decay goes back at least to the 60s. I could go on endlessly in this vein, but I don't want to bore you.

Complaining about the effects of liberal culture—whether on shooters specifically, crime more generally, or on all of society—has been a right-wing mainstay for as long as I've been alive. The left may be catching up, but it still has a ways to go.