Very Sensitive, And Very Confused, Students

When you're a right-wing Republican talk-show host and you can get two dogwhistles- Chicago and Baltimore- in the same rant, you're doing something right. The student protests at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Rush Limbaugh tells us, are the fault of Democrats and engineered by Rahm Emanuel.   The students shouldn't even be allowed to vote and they mainly want a bunch of free stuff. They don't realize their suffering has been caused by Barack Obama's policies and, of course, Baltimore. As with everything, Ronald Reagan would have known what to do about all this.

But he does get one thing right when he remarks

I know that if they had actually told the football players to go pound sand and therefore had canceled the game scheduled for this weekend in Kansas City, it's against BYU, it would have cost them a million dollars, a forfeiture fee.  If you don't show up, you owe a million bucks.  I still -- and, look, I know it's just me, and a lot of you think it's easy to say this kind of stuff when you're half a country away.  Missouri's in the middle of the country. We're here down in Florida. It's easy to say from this distance what you would do.  But I am not -- I've thought about this.  This is not the day after the event.  I've thought about it.  "You guys don't want to play, fine, we're not gonna play. We'll pay the forfeiture fee, but you are not running this college. The football team does not run this institution and we are not gonna react to a bunch of BS in the first place." 

As Limbaugh implies, football does run that place. Or at least it does at a lot of colleges,an appalling state of affairs, one largely being lost amid charges of  racist remarks and hurt feelings. Limbaugh did not develop that point, instead repeating the right-wing tropes which appeal to him and to his audience, its members unaware they do not enjoy the same privileges their radio hero does.

Ignored, too, by Limbaugh are principles of free expression and freedom ignored by the black activiss at Missouri (and by then-professor Melissa Click, below).  Fortunately, we have Will Bunch, who unlike Limbaugh empathizes with the students and strongly supports their objectives, to explain

 As students blocked journalists from a tent city on public university grounds, Concerned Students 1950 wrote on its Twitter feed: "We truly appreciate having our story told, but this movement isn't for you" -- unconsciously and hopefully unknowingly echoing the white racists like Alabama's Bull Connor and allies who'd labored hard and sometimes successfully to block journalists from covering the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Even worse was a so-called "communications" professor with an appointment in Missouri's nationally prestigious journalism department, the prosaically named Melissa Click, who called for "muscle" to physically harass and block journalists of the kind that she allegedly teaches.

In the last day, there have been positive developments; Concerned Students 1950 has backtracked and expressed a willingness to deal with the media; Click has apologized and severed her ties with the journalism department (which still isn't enough in my book; if Tim Wolfe had to go, and he did, then Melissa Click should be one-click deleted from the university roster.) But the one-day brouhaha ripped open a wound involving colleges campuses and free speech that has been festering for some time.

In Missouri, at least, students with laudablle goals fell back on some deplorable tactics. At Yale, hundreds of students have joined a protest that is hard to even summarize other than that it's bat-guano crazy -- what started as a legitimate if perhaps overwrought discussion about Halloween costumes then devolved into an embarrassing mass verbal-harassment campaign against an adult residence-hall "master," riddled with foul language and with one student shouting: " It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here."

Arguably even more troublesome are the events at Wesleyan University, where the campus newspaper had the gall (I'm being sarcastic) to publish an op-ed that mildly questioned the Black Lives Matters movement; in response, students first threatened to block delivery of the paper and then the student government cut the paper's funding. Godwin's law prevents me from saying what I truly think about that.

In the thousand or so think pieces that have been launched by Mizzou, Yale and other eruptions, a common theme is that social media from Twitter and Facebook to Snapchat and YikYak. and dozens of apps that those of us over the age of 22 have never heard of, have made the conventional media unnecessary for a social justice movement like Concerned Students 1950 or Black Lives Matter to reach folks. That's probably true -- but this isn't about anyone's damned audience reach, it's about fundamental rights.

Even if a newspaper like my beloved Daily News has only six readers left -- and trust me, we're getting there -- we have a right to be in a public space, take pictures and ask question, just like activists have the right (and have accomplished amazing things in exercising it) to Film the Police on a public sidewalk. Indeed, ask yourself how you might feel if the cops declared they needed "a safe space" to arrest (and maybe rough up, since you're no longer watching) protesters. 

To see the two things that I've always fought for as a writer in the public arena -- social justice, and unfettered free expression -- at war with each other is something that I find heartbreaking. I've been a fervent, sometimes overzealous defender of the Black Lives Matter movement, literally from the August 2014 weekend when an unarmed Mike Brown was gunned down in the streets of Ferguson -- and I've been continually harassed on social media and in numerous hate e-mails for doing so. And I find racist, sexist or homophobic Halloween costumes  utterly repulsive. But those aren't the principles at stake here. Hostility toward free speech and a free press might buy you an hour or two of "safe space" but they won't win the war against social injustice. It will only set things back. And it's about more than just the media.

What we need, not just on college campuses, is dialogue and debate that is sensitive, that expresses opinions, even strong ones, in ways that are careful not to needlessly offend others. What we don't need: The excessive use of "trigger warnings," which are meant to minimize exposure to trauma but can have the consequence of minimizing exposure to reality. I shudder to think what might have happened if the state violence against black people in Birmingham and at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma had come with trigger warnings -- unwatched for fear of traumatizing folks. Would the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 have even passed?

What we also don't need, again, are excessive "safe zones" -- which are, in effect, a retreat from the battlefield of ideas. Anybody who wishes to make a college campus "a home" -- like that misguided, obscenity spewing student at Yale -- needs to know that the best home for ideas is a messy one, a non-stop Thanksgiving feast of family members who love one another but quarrel constantly, over matters great and small. Anyone who doesn't think that college is about "creating an intellectual space" needs to get out and make room for a deserving kid who actually wants an education.

The folks who want to shut down campus newspapers and create "safe spaces" have been tagged "liberals." Maybe so, but what they are doing is completely antithetical to a real progressive movement that seeks both social justice and personal freedom. In a time of rampant inequality and corporate hegemony in America, we need a revolution -- and we need to be producing "street fighters" of ideas, not coddled retreaters to their intellectually spotless "home." For America to someday be the great nation it can truly be requires intellectually dangerous spaces, not safe ones.

Off campus, you're not going to be dealing with wishy-washy emailing professors or 19-year-olds wanting to shoot some video for the college newspaper, but actual determined enemies -- racist and reactionary bozos and heartless billionaires who'll ship your job overseas before they give you a raise from $8 an hour, and deport your parents just for the hell of it. And when these bad guys fight back, and they will, trust me -- you're not going to want a safe space. You're going to want the whole world watching.

Sensitive souls, theirs are. Consider also, though, that the president of the University of Missouri resigned rather than face a boycott which would result in forfeiture of the football team's next game, and of approximately $1million. The student-athletes crash their skulls repeatedly into other skulls and turf, risking early dementia, and are paid nothing. They raise not a whimper until a few individuals- representing no one but themselves- reportedly make racist remarks. Some people have strange priorities.

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Checking In On Carly

At the presidential debate in Milwaukee, Carly Fiorina slipped up, neglecting to insert into her responses any whoppers even approaching the order of magnitude of her Planned Parenthood whopper.

Still, the failed businesswoman managed in one response to contribute two truly awful recommendations, one picked up by the Center for American Progress and the other traveling under the radar.

Oh, she did actually avoid answering "If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?" However, most responses of the other candidates (Rand Paul often an exception), as well as of Fiorina, focused on a variation of their stump speech.

The question posed is a particularly knotty one for Republicans because, as this comparison to January, 2015 indicates (chart below from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)

An overall gain of 6.4 million more non-farm payroll jobs last month than in January 2009, which represents a 4.8% increase. All of that growth came from the private sector, while the public sector shrunk: Private payrolls have added 7 million jobs over Obama’s presidency, while government payrolls (federal, state and local) have contracted by a combined 634,000 jobs.

Since then, private sector employment has only grown. but Fiorina can be forgiven for claiming "this government has been growing bigger and bigger, more corrupt, less effective." "Less effective" is merely an unsubstantiated, subjective judgement and "more corrupt" is also subjective, albeit ludicrous.  And whatever the facts, Republicans also typically charge Democrats with creating "bigger" government, facts be damned, not unlike the portrayal (one, below) in TV commercials.







Fiorina's prescription for business de-regulation, however, is terrible, as explained by ThinkProgress' Todd Legum:

“We need to pass the REINS Act so Congress is in charge of regulation,” Fiorina told the debate audience, referring to an obscure bill intended to hobble federal agency action. Though it is unlikely that many people in the audience know what the REINS Act is, this bill has long been one of the top priorities of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the primary lobbying group representing big business as a whole. Moreover, the bill has a fairly high chance of becoming law if Republicans gain control over both houses of Congress and the presidency. The bill passed the GOP-controlled House on multiple occasions.

REINS is a general attack on federal regulatory system. Congress often passes laws that delegate authority to federal agencies to work out the details of relatively broad policy objectives set by federal statutes. The Clean Air Act, for example, requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set “standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines” if the EPA determines that those emissions “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

There are many reasons why Congress may wish to delegate authority in this way. The EPA employs scientists and policy experts who have far more expertise in motor vehicle emissions than members of Congress, so the EPA is more likely to make educated judgments about the details of environmental policy. New studies may reveal that a particular emission that was previously viewed as benign is actually far more dangerous — or they may reveal the opposite, that a chemical once viewed as dangerous is actually much less so. The Clean Air Act permits the EPA to respond relatively nimbly to these developments rather than having to push through new legislation every time a researcher publishes new data that should inform regulators. Similarly, EPA regulators can adapt to new technological developments, encouraging the use of certain technologies while relaxing standards related to others as new ways of reducing emissions are discovered.

REINS, however, would effectively lock much of the federal regulatory system in place. Under this bill, any new regulation that has an “annual economic impact of $100 million or more,” an amount that seems large, but that actually amounts to less than 0.0006 percent of the U.S. economy, must be approved by Congress or else it does not go into effect. Moreover, the bill provides that if Congress does not act “by the end of 70 session days or legislative days . . . then the rule described in that resolution shall be deemed not to be approved and such rule shall not take effect.”

The United States, of course, has a Congress that can barely decide whether to fund the government or avoid a catastrophic debt default. So it’s easy to imagine what would happen if Congress were given a tight deadline to approve dozens of tweaks to America’s regulatory structure every year. Changes to that structure would, for the most part, cease to exist.

As part of the same response, and immediately presenting the REINS idea, Fiorina maintained "we need to actually reform the tax code. Go to a three-page tax code. Yes, there are plans that would reform our tax code to three pages."

Usually when this zombie concept is presented, it is as "go to a single-page" (or two pages, it really doesn't matter) "tax return" with the proviso that all deductions are eliminated.  In general circulation, this idea wouldn't fly, if only that removing the deduction for interest paid on a home mortagage would prove rather disconcerting.

Two months ago, a highly skeptical Forbes contributor, explaining the inevitable complexity of tax law, remarked "I’m really looking forward to the Fiorina campaign releasing the three-page tax code that the candidate is proposing."  However, even in the extremely unlikely event all deductions were eliminated in the new code, Politics 201 would demand that they return. Neither Comcast, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Exxon Mobil, the NRA or (virtually) any other corporation would accomodate the public by firing all its lobbyists and accept an inhospitable tax code.  Not going to happen.

The beauty of Carly Fiorina, however, is that she was too slick to go there. She said merely "go to a three-page tax code," one which could easily include something like "Nothing in this legislation shall be construed to eliminate, repeal, or modify any existing preference."

Kudos to Todd Legum for focusing on the danger in the candidate's dream of eliminating consumer and worker protections.  But she is so shifty and shameless, it would take the classic infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite amount of time to come up with her next harebrained scheme. And have I mentioned how loathsome Carly Fiorina is?

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We Have A Winner!

After each debate, the "Politico Caucus," which Politico describes as a "bipartisan survey of the top activists, strategists and operatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," declares "winners" and "losers."

On the whole, Rubio, Bush, Paul, Cruz, and Fiorina are perceived to have done well in Milwaukee and only Dr. Carson and, especially, John Kasich, to have laid an egg.  That's not surprising because of the ample time given the candidates to give their stump speech. Occasionally, a moderator would tell the candidate he or she went over the time allotted, after which the candidate would continue because, hey, no one wants to be Kellyed. 

Politico wrote

several respondents from both sides of the aisle who said Rubio had a good night also argued that while they saw him as the winner, it wasn’t a blow-out performance — other candidates also had solid showings.

“Several candidates had a good night, but Rubio had strong substance and presentation,” a South Carolina Republican said. “Jeb was probably good enough to stop some of his bleeding.”

Added a Nevada Democrat who selected Rubio, “Rubio, Trump, Bush, Paul and Cruz all seem to have held their own, but I wouldn't say there was a clear winner.”

The runner-ups for best performance, according to the survey, were Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina with 12 percent each, followed by Rand Paul with 8 percent and Ted Cruz and Ben Carson at 6 percent, according to Republican insiders.

“Jeb was most in need of a strong performance, and he was much improved,” a New Hampshire Republican said. “At a minimum, he has bought himself more time to reset and start advancing.”

Cruz was the favorite of several non-partisan participants, one of whom, from New Hampshire, called him the “most articulate” of all the candidates, and another, from Nevada, called him “always focused, on message.”

Really,  now, let's be objective. The real winner was Maria Bartiromo, who stayed on message throughout.In an interview with Politico sometime prior to the debate, the Fox Business Channel host stated

After that [CNBC] debate, I realized, I knew my marching orders. It was clearer than ever what my marching orders are, and that is to help the viewer, help the voter better understand what each candidate’s plan is; is it a realistic plan, can it work and how is it different from the next guy or gal, and that’s what I plan to focus on.

Marching orders? After she let the cat out of the bag, Bartiromo cleaned it up a bit- but.marching orders?  Some of the conservative talking points (in asterisks; comments beneath) she added to her questions:

Today the national debt is at record highs and growing unsustainably. Interest will be the fastest-growing part of the federal budget, tripling over the next 10 years. Social Security, the lifeline of millions of American seniors, is rushing toward insolvency...

The national debt is not growing unsustainably and the deficit has declined by two-thirds since Barack Obama took office (chart below by OMB via Politico).  Social Security, with its dedicated source of funding, has nothing to do with the national debt (or deficit) Inasmuch as (according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, its chart below, from OECD statistics) "After 2034, even if policymakers took no further action, Social Security could still pay three-fourths of scheduled benefits, relying on Social Security taxes as they are collected," Social Security is not "rushing toward insolvency."

Senator Cruz, the International Monetary Fund recently cut its expectations for economic growth. Many economists expect a recession to hit the U.S. within the next year due to the weakening of manufacturing. The next president will have to deal with it.

No doubt many of the thousands of economists in the USA believe a recession will hit within a year. However, this past summer, The New York Times

asked leading forecasters from economic consultancies, financial firms and universities for their predictions on where key economic variables will stand on Nov. 8, 2016 — Election Day. The 17 who participated replied with a relatively strong consensus.

They said they believed that unemployment would be the lowest it has been during an election since George W. Bush and Al Gore faced off in 2000, when it stood at 3.9 percent. The median forecast for the unemployment rate when voters go to the polls in November 2016 was 4.8 percent (which would be down from 5.3 percent last month). They saw only a 15 percent chance of a recession starting by next Election Day. Interest rates, inflation and gasoline prices should all be a bit higher than they are now, they said, while staying quite low by historical standards.

Moreover, early in the year, the chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers explained (NAM's chart, below)

Respondents to the latest National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)/IndustryWeek survey continued to be mostly upbeat in their assessments of the economy, but the challenges discussed above have dampened some of that enthusiasm. In this report, 88.5% of manufacturers said that they were either somewhat or very optimistic about their own company's outlook.

Almost 40 percent of Americans are without a job and are not looking. Many have given up. That’s what the participation rate tells us....

Uh, no, Maria, The unemployment rate is down to 5.1% and approximately 40% of those individuals have given up looking for work. That would total around 7%, slightly less than 40%.


Mr. Trump, a federal appeals court just dealt a blow to the Obama administration’s plan to prevent the deportation of 5 million people living in this country illegally. The White House is appealing to the Supreme Court....

Ms. Bartiromo refers to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which pertains to young people who were under the age of 16 when they arrived, generally with their parents.  Such specificity, however, would have conflicted with the meme. People, even some Republicans, sympathize with children.


We go back to Facebook. Dewayne Wesley Cato asks on Facebook, how do we get rid of regulations choking our businesses? Ms. Fiorina?

Those "regulations choking our businesses" somehow have not prevented unprecedented corporate growth under the Obama Administration. Fourteen months ago- when the economy was a little weaker than it is today-  this Forbes contributor argued that the nation under Obama has enjoyed the highest private sector job growth in its history and "economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories."


Specifically, under the president’s Affordable Care Act, employers with 50 or more employees are required to offer health insurance, or be fined. Many are opting to pay the fine. Others are cutting back employee hours to duck the law altogether. What specific ways will you alleviate the pressure on small business?

Early this year, Ben Casselman of five thirty eight reviewed the Current Population Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistica and found

the share of part-timers working just below 30 hours a week has been rising for roughly the past two years, while the share working just over 30 hours has been falling. (The share working exactly 30 hours has risen a bit too, but that’s harder to interpret since people who work 29 or 31 hours might round to 30 when they answer the survey.)

,,,,even focusing just on the most affected workers, the impact has been small. In 2009, before the Affordable Care Act was passed, 9.7 percent of part-timers worked between 25 hours and 29 hours and 7.7 percent worked between 31 and 34. In 2013, those numbers were 11.1 percent and 6.6 percent, respectively.

Further, as the chart below from the BLS reflects

The Congressional Budget Office, in a report before the law had fully taken effect, estimated that millions of Americans would voluntarily shift to part-time status once they no longer needed to work full-time to qualify for health benefits.9 It’s hard to know exactly how many have already done so. But there has been a marked increase in recent months in the number of people reporting they are working part-time by choice. It’s possible, a sliberal economist Dean Baker has suggested, that this rise reflects the effect of the health law.

The GOP candidates are so concerned about the American worker that three of them definitively came out against any increase in the minimum wage while one, John Kasich, noted that he had signed into a law a "modest increase.""  

Kasich did not address the idea of increasing the national minimum wage, recognizing that was too hot for the audience to handle. Later, he allowed that he would consider the plight of individual investors if a bank were to fail.  He was, of course, booed and was considered the big loser of the night. In a debate in which one of the moderators told us beforehand that she would hew to the Fox/GOP party line, that only made sense.








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Kim Davis, Victor

Kim Davis, 1; rule of law, 0.

After the US Supreme Court decided in June that states could not prohibit same-sex marriages, Court Clerk Kim Davis (photo D. Easley/AP) of Rowan County, Kentucky refused to sign any marriage licenses.  She was arrested and put into jail while deputy clerks, replacing Davis' name with that of the county, issued licenses, same-sex and otherwise. Davis was released as federal Judge David Bunning ordered that she

shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples. If Defendant Davis should interfere in any way with their issuance, that will be considered a violation of this order and appropriate sanctions will be considered.

Davis was released with what seemed like bold words from the son of former US Representative (and Hall of Fame pitcher) Jim Bunning (R-Ky), who was Ted Cruz before Ted Cruz.   However, if at the time you noticed a loophole in the Judge's order, you deserve to dive into the Halloween candy you had resisted. As Reuters reported, "she removed her name, title and personal authorization on the licenses. A deputy clerk has issued licenses since her jailing in early September."  And if you foresaw that a Kentucky governor would drive a wedge through that loophole, you deserve even more because

Two months after a county clerk in Kentucky became a national figure and was jailed for refusing to grant marriage licenses bearing her name to same-sex couples, the state’s governor-elect said Friday that soon after taking office, he would order new licenses that do not have clerks’ names, a change that would address one objection raised by opponents of same-sex marriage.

Lawyers for Kim Davis, the clerk in Rowan County who has said that same-sex marriage violates her Christian beliefs, have argued that forcing her to issue licenses with her name on them violated her rights by suggesting that she endorsed the unions. The courts have not agreed, but lawmakers have said the conflict could be resolved by altering the licenses.

“One thing I will take care of right away is we will remove the names of the county clerks from the marriage forms,” Matt Bevin, the Republican governor-elect, said Friday at a news conference at the State Capitol in Frankfort.

It makes sense in a Machiavellian sort of way.  The right gets what it wants, vindication for a high-profile opponent of gay marriage and a roadmap for eroding marriage rights in other states. Most gay couples in Kentucky still have what they yearned for, equality with married couples in their state.

Even Chris Hayes was mollified and remarked  

As a strong supporter of marriage equality myself, I think this is a perfectly fine solution. If this is what that accommodation comes to, fine. No one cares if some county clerk`s name is on their marriage license anyway.

People get married, want to see their own name on the marriage license, along with the name of the one they love. If everyone can now go back to work and we can all move on, then way to go, Matt Bevin.

Chris Hayes is deluding himself if he thinks he still is a strong supporter of "marriage equality." Same-sex marriage (as with traditional marriage) in Kentucky is no longer on the same footing as marriage in the 49 other states.

Civil unions, as reflected in changing perspectives and laws, had been gaining ground in the USA prior to the court's ruling. However, even though actual rights and benefits were equal (or nearly so), supporters of same-sex marriage were unimpressed because civil unions left gay couples with something different than heterosexual couples.  The arrangement was not necessarily inferior- but it was different.  Hence, it was unacceptable- or so we were led to believe.

There is also some doubt as to whether the licenses are valid, though Bevin (who will assume office December 8) labels the belief the governor cannot change the marriage form unilaterally "baloney. We will do that by executive order. We will do that right out of the gate."

Issuing an executive order "right out of the gate" (at least he didn't say "on Day 1") takes some nerve for Bevin, who has maintained "President Obama's executive order on amnesty is an unconstitutional overreach by his administration."  Still, it may prove a slick option for a guy with as much regard for the rule of law as Judge Bunning, whose order now appears toothless. The incoming governor has decided not to assert that government employee Davis must comply with both the spirit and the law of the Supreme Court's order.

It is possible such an executive order by the governor of Kentucky will not be overturned. Decisions by many courts are erratic and reflect questionable judicial temperament.  (Justice Kennedy in Obergfell: "Marriage... allows two people to find a life that could not be found alone.")  However, it is a gutless move by a chief executive who should insist upon the rule of law by telling the Court Clerk to obey the letter and the spirit of the US Supreme Court.

In not doing so, Kim Davis is engaged in dereliction of duty and should do the only honorable thing: resign. Otherwise, though  Chris Hayes may not realize it, Mr. Bevin surely understands Kim Davis has stood up to the US Supreme Court and the same-sex marriage movement. And won.

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Mortified At Facing Carson

Rush Limbaugh said something silly today.

That wouldn't be when he referred to Politico's report(s) about Ben Carson and West Point as "Not just the biased, but racist journalism that it was." That is a preposterous allegation offered without any evidence, though that is Rush Limbaugh, a guy who labeled Senator Obama a "Chicago street thug" and "little black man-child"; and who called no-drama President Obama "an angry black guy" and claimed "Obama's entire economic program is reparations." The latter charge earned the response from Stephen Colbert "Those guys aren't racist. They're just saying that a program that helps the poor is actuallly a secret plot by African-Americans to steal white people's money."

Even more absurdly, while attacking Politico and the left for questioning the ever-righteous Ben Carson, Limbaugh today declared "It scares them he might become president.  It scares them that anybody like him, any religious conservative might become president. That's why they support the Democrat Party.  I'm convinced.  They're scared to death of religious people."

Quaking in their boots, I tell you.  It's curious that Limbaugh believes liberals worry "any religious conservative might become President," when right-wing icon Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6) pretended he was religious and George W. Bush probably was.  But never mind.

The left need not fear a religious conservative on the order of Dr. Carson as president (Carson on a tirade, video below). The first prerequisite to obtaining the Oval Office is a single-minded conviction to get there. However, as Amanda Marcotte observes

Carson is not running a typical campaign for office—arguably, he’s not really trying to win office at all—so much as he’s trying to build his brand as a fundamentalist Christian icon. He wants his book to be wrapped and placed under every evangelical’s tree this Christmas. After he bows out of the presidential race, he has a nice career ahead of him as an “inspirational” speaker—and seller of tapes and sermons and educational materials—for the Christian right circuit. His exaggerated tales of sin and redemption sound bizarre to most Americans, but they are par for the course in the evangelical circles that Carson is trying to win over.

Take the Yale story: A young man who needs $10 and doesn’t have it and then is put in this situation where his convictions are tested and voila! He is given the $10 he needed. It’s a weird story if taken literally. But the story is perfect for a Sunday sermon on how the good Lord will provide to the righteous man. The likeliest explanation is not that Carson was too stupid to understand what was going on, but that he used his real life experience to fabricate a story meant to be read aloud from pulpits or turned into coloring books to be used in Sunday school.

Hammering messy real world experiences into trite fables about sin and redemption is standard operating procedure in conservative Christian circles. So is the exaggeration. Tales of your behavior before you were saved are embellished for maximum drama. What’s important is not the literal truth, but reinforcing fundamentalist notions that the world outside of the Jesus bubble is a depraved hellhole.

Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, Ben Carson will not be nominated. Were he to be so blessed (as he would put it), there would be an historic turnover in the US Senate and in the House.  There aren't many opportunities to run against a fellow who has compared the Affordable Care Act, gun control, political correctness, the progressive movement, and abortion to slavery and/or the Holocaust.(also, women who have abortions to slaveowners).. And did you know that some guys go into prison as straight and come out as gay?

Dr. Carson is, as Charlie Pierce puts it, a "guy (who) says his unprovable biographical details are true because he's running as a Paschal Lamb against an imaginary conspiracy, and his primary competition is explaining the structure of the pyramids to you, as well as the decades-old wanderings of William Westmoreland and the tensile strength of belt buckles as body armor."   Terrified.















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Hardly A Dime's Worth Of Difference

Jack Mirkinson believes the appearance Saturday night of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live is "a notable and rather strange intervention by 'SNL'" because politicians (aside from the hapless Al Sharpton in early 2003) have hosted the NBC program only between campaigns.  Writing before the show aired, Mirkinson argued Trump's campaign "long since crossed the line from entertainment into serious reality."  He cites the candidate's "toxic" comments about Latinos, "tacit acceptance of anti-Muslim racism," and "openly bigoted birther crusade."

Although aimed at SNL, Mirkinson's piece is only one which has implied that the presidential candidate and his philosophy are significantly more malignant as those we have recently witnessed from mainstream Republican conservatism.

The difference, however, is les than meets the eye.  One does not have to recall Mitt Romney's infamous "47%" comment to recognize that most American presidential elections, traditionally, have been decided less on a cultural or foreign policy basis than on an economic one, defined broadly. After considering the analysis by the "left-leaning but independent" Citizens for Tax Justice and the conservative Tax Foundation of the tax proposal of the mainstream and most likely GOP nominee, Jonathan Cohn summarizes

Estimates have suggested that Rubio’s tax cut would increase deficits by anywhere from $4 trillion to $12 trillion over 10 years, depending on how you count. Either way, it’d be a staggering amount of money -- so staggering that even prominent conservatives have blanched at the price tag. But according to the CTJ analysis, the poorest one-fifth of the country would keep just 6 percent of the money while the bottom 60 percent, as a whole, would get just 22 percent. By contrast, the richest 5 percent of Americans would pocket nearly half of the tax cut while the richest 1 percent alone would receive more than one-third. 

Keep in mind that, in the real world, the poor’s share of the tax cut would probably be smaller than either the CTJ or Tax Foundation analysis suggests. That’s because Rubio campaign officials have said they would limit the refundable tax break to people who are working....

Whatever the details of the refundable credit, the bottom line is clear. If enacted, the bulk of the money in Rubio's tax cut would go to the affluent and a huge chunk would go to the very richest of the rich. Meanwhile, the loss of so much revenue would require some combination of higher deficits and deep cuts to government programs, most of which disproportionately benefit the poor and middle class.

According to CTJ's numbers (graphs below via Dylan Matthews of Vox), the cuts proposed by Trump and John Ellis Bush would jack up the deficit only slightly less than those proposed by the Florida senator. Rubio's plan would deliver more handouts to the very wealthy, slightly more for the poor, and less for middle-income taxpayers.

Tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum.   Two and a half months ago, Salon's Conor Lynch concluded "the scary thing is that America would probably be better off with a president Trump than any of the other major GOP contenders, who are either puppets for their corporate masters or wholly controlled by their dogma (i.e. Mike Huckabee’s Christian chauvinism)."

And then there is the current leader- Dr. Ben Carson- in national and Iowa polls. He wants to eliminate Medicare (video, below). Three days ago, Charlie Pierce described how as Mannatech Corporation's most famous shill, Carsib is in a long line of  of snake-oil salesman in the USA. Politically

The process began with Ronald Reagan, the greatest patent-medicine salesman of them all. It was he who marketed the economic snake-oil with a wink and a smile. It was he who taught them how to flex and pose – fiercely denouncing terrorism while selling missiles to the mullahs. It was he who gulled the country with tales of Sandinistas driving jeeps across the Rio Grande, and dangerous Cuban adventurism in Grenada, while Marines were being slaughtered in their barracks. He was the best show in town. The starstruck rubes flocked to see him. The country swallowed the swamproot whole.









Donald Trump at least at one time opposed the Iraq War, opposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and supported universal healthcare.  Having taken in with the wrong crowd, he now competes with the rest of the GOP field to prove he is the most extreme of them all. He has a lot of people convinced, but he really is just of a piece of what the Republican Party has become nationally.








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Guns, Drugs, And Prison

Salon's Daniel Denvir deserves a lot of credit for arguing

At a moment when Congress is considering winding down mandatory minimums, however modestly, one should take a close look at any gun control measure that touts more more prison time as the solution. If Sanders and Clinton are serious about ending mass incarceration, they should too.

He deserves roughly as much credit as a person asserting "one should take a close look at any proposal for expansion of treatment facilities as the solution for drug addiction."   Out-patient and in-patient programs put a dent in substance abuse but would not end the drug scourge. Neither would "a gun control masure that touts more prison time" end mass incarceration or gun violence.  Like treatment programs, though, it is one part of a multi-pronged strategy (video below from San Diego in 2009).










Denvir laments that gun control measures "that mete out harsh sentences for illegal gun possession, or possessing a gun while dealing drugs or committing another crime, primarily target black men and have won support from both conservatives and law-and-order liberals." He notes

Like other aspects of the criminal justice system, people of color are the ones who most often end up behind bars.

In fiscal year 2014, just 18-percent of those who were sentenced under the mandatory minimum statute for carrying a gun related to a violent or drug crime were white, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. 54-percent were black and 25-percent were Hispanic.

The maximum penalty for most white collar crimes is severe and presumably imposed primarily upon non-Hispanic whites.  It would be foolish to eliminate most penalties simply because they fall most often upon whites or males or individuals of means.

No doubt the 18/25/54 statistics cited by Denvir are accurate and  reflect laws which disproportionately affect blacks, and especially, young men. They also are mandatory minimums, which themselves reduce the arbitrariness of sentencing, which otherwise disadvantages blacks.

Removal of young black men from society for carrying a gun related to a violent or drug crime has a significant impact upon those individuals. Nonetheless, it has a great (and beneficial) impact also upon the community- often black- in which those weapons are possessed and in which they are expected to be used. The door swings both ways.

But Denvir's argument fails most miserably when he makes the (probably) technically accurate, but nearly irrelevant, argument that individuals sentenced "for carrying a gun related to a violent or drug crime... don't exactly qualify as violent criminals."

Leniency often is appled toward drug users, who have committed victimless crimes, and who may need treatment.  Similarly, illegal weapons may be possessed for relatively benign purposes and by individuals not prone to criminality. They, too, legitimately escape incarceration..

Among those benign purposes, however, is not one to enforce the terms of a drug deal. Threatening to blow away someone who cheats on a drug transaction is not a legitimate reason to possess a weapon and the offender, insofar as the law allows it, should be removed from society for a protracted period of time.

There are legitimate means to reducing mass incarceration. Nonetheless, except in rare circumstances, no charity, no "mercy of the court," is due the man with illegal drugs and an unlawful weapon. Punishment, infrequently swift in our criminal justice system, must at least be severe.







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