Anti-Semitism in State Politics

Tom Schweich, the Missouri state auditor and a candidate for governor, committed suicide after complaining about a Republican political ad that compared him to Barney Fife, the bumbling deputy sheriff in the old Andy Griffith show, and about a pernicious “whispering campaign” among Republicans regarding his religious affiliation – specifically, that he was Jewish, a heritage that, if true, would doubtless cost him the votes of some of the electorate’s dimmer bulbs.  He believed party chairman John Hancock was responsible for the rumor.

Hancock denied it, saying he “may have” mentioned in passing that he thought Schweich was Jewish but that any such mention was innocent and done in the same way that one might mention that someone was Presbyterian or Catholic, and therefore had no anti-semitic overtones.

There are a couple of problems with that:

1. There is no “may have’ here.  Either Hancock did or did not say, or speculate, that Schweich was Jewish.  So, when he says “may have” that means he did.  If he didn’t. he would have denied it.

2. Schweich was not Jewish.  He was a prominent member of St. Michael and St. George Episcopal; Church in Clayton, a church that doubtless counts among its members some staunch Republicans, prominent or otherwise.  That Hancock, party chairman and former top political consultant whose job is to formulate and implement the strategies that will defeat Democratic candidates, didn’t know what religion Schweich was is simply not plausible.  He did know, but brought up the Jewish thing anyway.

3. The contention that mentioning in passing that someone is Jewish -- in general and particularly in the context of a political campaign -- is the same as mentioning that they're Presbyterian or Catholic is such obvious claptrap that it’s hard to believe anyone would take it seriously. The Hancocks of this world mention Jewishness "in passing" for one reason and one reason only: to produce a reaction and a result  -- part of a long tradition of mentioning Jewishness to produce a result.

Hancock’s defenders have denied the existence of any whispering campaign, arguing that it was a delusion -- the product of an unhinged mind.  Schweich’s suicide is evidence that he was, in fact, unhinged, and there is every reason to believe that his problems ran far deeper than distress over political advertising and dirty-tricks speculation regarding his religion.  But the fact that the whispering campaign was not a reason to commit suicide does not mean that the campaign didn’t exist.  The fact that Hancock speculated on Schweich’s Jewishness, even though he doubtless knew better, is evidence that it did exist..  Further, the state’s most distinguished Republican, former Senator John Danforth, said in his eulogy for Schweich that such a campaign did in fact exist and he sharply criticized his party for doing it.  Danforth may not be the party kingpin that he once was, but the idea that he doesn’t know what’s going on in Missouri Republican circles is not believable.  He does know.

The shame here is twofold:  That people resort to anti-semitic innuendo, and that there is a market for it.  They do and there is.

After-the-Fact Quarterback

No one feels sorry for professional football coaches, who have astronomical salaries, legions of adoring acolytes in the public and sporting press, and more than the normal allotment of toadies.  But they do have their crosses to bear, most notably the lacerations inflicted by football tacticians whose expertise is born entirely of hindsight.  These people are known – in football and, metaphorically, in a thousand other pursuits -- as Monday morning quarterbacks.  Their primary function: To dissect the tactical worth of play calls after the outcome of those plays is known.

A lot of this goes on in a lot of different activities, but it is endemic to football. It goes on, to a greater or lesser extent, with just about every play (since every play has an outcome.) God knows it’s a thoroughly explored phenomenon here in St. Louis where legitimate coaching shortcomings have kept the Rams out of the playoffs since the Clinton administration.  But legitimacy often gives way to irrationality, as when a play goes for a touchdown, and then, when the exact same play is stuffed at the line of scrimmage, the team is accused of, quelle horreur!, unimaginative play calling. Or, to put it another way, a play that works is a good call, and a play that doesn’t work is a bad call, even if it’s the same play. This is the equivalent, in baseball, of saying your slugger should never have swung at that pitch, unless he hits a home run, in which case he should have. Never once has a football fan been heard to say, following a touchdown, “I wish they hadn’t run that play; it was a bad call.”

Which brings us to the 2015 Super Bowl and the more or less instant judgment – and something that became conventional wisdom before the confetti settled to the ground – that calling the pass play on which the outcome of the game turned was a demonstrably and self-evidently idiotic decision..  The thing, however, is this:  Had that play gone for a touchdown – and it absolutely could have – no one, as the trophies were being handed out and the breathless winners were being interviewed and the Gatorade was being splashed about, would have been saying what a dumb idea it was. The likelihood, in fact, is that the exact same people now calling the exact same play moronic would be calling it dazzling and tactically amazing and would be nominating Pete Carroll for genius of the century.

But wait.  Everyone knows that calling for a pass play in that situation is crazy…something no one does and no one of sound mind would ever do. Right?  Wrong. That strategy -- trying a pass play on second down inside the five -- is not a wrong one or even an unusual one.  Nor is it a particularly risky one.  From Benjamin Morris of the Web site FiveThirtyEightSports, we get this information: “On the 1-yard line, quarterbacks threw 66 touchdowns with no interceptions prior to Wilson’s errant toss. Not mentioned: They also scored four touchdowns on scrambles (which Wilson is pretty good at last I checked). That’s a 60.9 percent success rate. Just for comparison’s sake, here’s how more than 200 runs fared this year in the same situation: 125 led to touchdowns; 94 failed to score, of those, 23 were for loss of yardage; two resulted in lost fumbles.”

So, the idea that it was an inexplicably cockamamie call from nowheresville is just wrong.  In fact, it was closer to being a customary call in that situation. There is an element of class resentment in play here, as in “these overpaid geniuses can’t see what we ordinary joes can see as plain as the nose in your face.”  But what all the ordinary joes need to get their heads around: The play call didn’t fail.  The play failed.  (If they are prepared to say they’d have branded the play dumb and crazy even if it had won the Super Bowl for the Seahawks, then I stand corrected.)

Here’s the Morris article, which contains lots of interesting information about this episode…

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-head-coach-botched-the-end-of-the-super-bowl-and-it-wasnt-pete-carroll/

Palin Again

(This post was first published in 2011.  Unfortunately, it again seems relevant.)

A recent declaration by Sarah Palin that she doesn’t intend to shut up is the best news the Democrats have gotten in months. In her public life to date, everything that has come out of her mouth that hasn’t been uninformed in content and inarticulate in execution has been hopelessly bland and non-specific -- completely lacking in any indication that she has any but the vaguest understanding of basic principles of governance, conservative or otherwise. And there’s no reason not to expect that to continue.

Soon after the election, it seemed that the Palin phenomenon had ended -- that she had disappeared from the national stage for good, and, as conservative pundits and politicians had their inevitable what-was-I-thinking moment, the idea of her taking on the leadership role in the Republican party had receded further and further into the gloaming.

But no. She reappeared with a book, then a television show, and has managed to stay alternately on the fringes or in the forefront of public consciousness throughout. People who seem otherwise reasonably sensible are again saying things about her – things which, if they say them, they presumably believe them -- that are totally at odds with the evidence – the evidence she herself has supplied with her every public utterance.

An article by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal asks “what's behind the left's deranged hatred” of Palin. The answer is, it’s not deranged and it’s not hatred -- and it’s not just the left. It’s a simple recognition of that fact that she is the lightest of intellectual lightweights – an unschooled talking-point repeater totally lacking in statecraft skills and with no real understanding of “the American people” she repeatedly and thoughtlessly invokes. Granted, she has this in common with many politicians, maybe most, but still… this is the person that seemingly sane party strategists see as their leader?

The more relevant question, then, isn’t what's behind the left's deranged hatred of Palin, but what’s behind the right’s deranged infatuation with her. What has she said or done, or thought or written, that demonstrates to this constituency that she belongs at the top of government? Nothing about her stands up to detached analysis, leading to the conclusion that their support is, at bottom, emotional – schoolboy/schoolgirl crushes formed during the time of her initial public emergence that they haven’t gotten over yet. In any case, they continue to say things about her that are demonstrably not true. One pundit, for example, referred to Palin’s “obvious smarts” – a real head-scratcher, because if she has any smarts, to date, they’ve been anything but obvious.

The flip side of the conservative punditry’s inexplicable enthusiasm for Gov. Palin is the indignation with which they’ve reacted to the less-than-enthusiastic reception her initial selection received in many quarters, and their righteous anger at what they consider to have been unfair treatment in the press. Well, one pales at the thought of the lacerations these same people would be inflicting on Gov. Palin if she were a Democrat and been offered up by that party as its VP candidate. This person is a lightweight, not national-candidate timbre, is what Republicans would be saying – and much, much more – if Palin were on the other team. Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh and all the rest would have set new records for sneering.

To risk stating the obvious, Sen. McCain didn't pick Gov. Palin because he thought she would make a good vice president or a good president. He picked her because he thought it would help him win the election, and he didn't hesitate to put her the proverbial heartbeat away. Ironically, the calculation, cold as it was, that Palin’s selection would drive votes to the Republican ticket was remarkably clueless, and demonstrated the bizarre understanding McCain and his team seemed to have about actual voters out here in flyover territory. At the very least, the idea that this would bring women voters over to their side speaks loudly and clearly about their low opinion of women voters.

In the days and weeks after the election, Sen. McCain diplomatically declined to publicly implicate Palin in the failure of his ticket. But he has to know that her selection was a ghastly mistake that came perilously close to making a laughing stock of his campaign. As for Gov. Palin’s political future: The likelihood is that her refusal to “shut up” will lead, sooner or later, to her exit from the national political stage and a retreat to the television reality show hosting career that her cynical thrust at high office may have been aimed at all along.

Income Inequality (cont'd)

 Among the various obsessions of true believers of the right and left, the idea of “income inequality” is one of the more incomprehensible, inasmuch as income inequality is a state of affairs just about all of us, including crusading editorial writers, spend our adult lives trying to achieve.  Its pursuit is why we go to college, send our kids to college, work hard, improve our skills and get better at our jobs, work ourselves half to death, and lecture our children on the importance of hard work and good grades and not settling for being that tattooed guy behind the counter at the local Git ‘n’ Go. We try to better ourselves.  We try to improve our lives and the lives of the people who depend on us. We strive, because we want to make our incomes unequal to the incomes of those who don’t.  There is nothing unusual or immoral or unfair about this, and it’s something that is universally embraced – left, right, and center – in this country.  But, maybe it’s something every generation has to learn anew, as they grow into adulthood and try to come to grips with the reality that while people are equal under the law, they are not equal in terms of intellect, drive, or wealth-creating ability and ambition.  Some people are smarter and more industrious – and more willing to sacrifice in the short term for the sake of the long -- than others.  Get used to it.

I assume that when people talk about income inequality, they understand that its opposite is income equality – a condition in which all people make the same amount of money. How they think that would work, and why they think it would be desirable, is anybody’s guess. Note to the income-inequality-anguished: If that’s not what you mean by the term, then you should let us know what you do mean.  Please be specific. 

From what I can gather, specifity here is a statistical exercise in which the breakdown of wealth concentration in the U.S. is put on display, and the display itself becomes prima facie evidence of an unfair and possibly dangerous state of affairs about which something needs to be done. As in…

·        The top 1% took in 23.5% of all of the country's income in 2007. In 1979 they only took in 8.9%.

• Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined. In 2007, the latest year for which figures are available from the Federal Reserve Board, the richest 1% of U.S. households owned 33.8% of the nation's private wealth. That's more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.

·        400 people have as much wealth as half of our population. The combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion. The combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion.

They draw these statistics like a gun, as though the wrongness of the conditions they describe is self-evident.  But what all of it really means is that while the numbers and percentages go up and down, the basic picture remains as it has been since time immemorial: Some folks have a whole lot of money and most of the rest of us don’t.  The obvious question is:  So what? That people do not all make the same amount of money; and that there are far fewer rich people than not-rich people is not news, nor is it “wrong” or immoral. Wealth accumulation is not a zero-sum game; money that the extremely rich take in does not come out of the pool available to wage earners and others. Those people (which is most of us) are free to improve upon their circumstances regardless of what wealthy people are or are not up to. People are not poor because other people are rich. It is absolutely true that improving upon one’s circumstances can be quite difficult, but the difficulty does not stem from what other people have or don’t have.

Also, this: Not everyone who is un-rich is poor.  In fact, very few of us are in that category.  The reality is that every single one of us occupies a slot on a vast continuum of income levels ranging from the very-hard-up to the just-making-ends-meet to the doing-okay to the plenty-prosperous to the really-rich to the have-more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with – and the innumerable slots in between.  The idea of just two classes – a ridiculously wealthy one-percent and everyone else in the poverty-stricken masses -- is illusory. That there is a tiny and super-powerful coterie of lavishly wealthy moustache-twirling villains cackling over the plight of the wretched rest of us is a mythology from which those who bemoan income inequality appear to draw much of their energy and anger.  But that’s not the reality.  The reality is that there is still a huge middle class in this country that does okay and whose members are unconcerned with how (or how much) money flows to the top 1%.

There is a rich vein of class resentment mixed with adolescent moral indignation in the income inequality argument that is hard to ignore. The sense is that anyone with money, simply by virtue of having that money, doesn’t deserve it; and anyone who doesn’t have money, simply by virtue of not having money, does deserve it.  The very rich have “more than they need” and should therefore, in the service of remediating the income inequality problem, hand some of it over to people who don’t. In fact, most of the people who think that are themselves impossibly rich compared to other people in the world and even in the U.S.  It’s all relative.  Does the editorial writer who makes $150,000 a year even understand that he is most certainly rich compared to a person who makes $20,000 a year?  Doers he understand that their income inequality is gulf-like?  The very idea of a guy who makes, say, $250,000 a year resenting and castigating members of the top 1% is laughable.  It is indisputable that the $250K guy, including the one who rails against the evils of income inequality, is identified far more closely in most people’s minds with the top 1-percenters than he is with the $20K guy.

In this country, there are people without means who need and deserve the help of the rest of us.  We should give it to them.  And we do.  But that’s a different discussion from the gauzy concept of income inequality, which seems to be arguing that a tiny and incredibly greedy minority is rendering all of us poverty-stricken. Fighting about it has the effect of siphoning political energy and resources away from related but real problems, including a tax code that may not share the tax burden fairly, and shifts in the economic landscape that have caused less-than-robust wage growth and the contraction of the middle class.  Hand-wringing over income inequality is a self-indulgent and unproductive exercise in moral superiority of the sort that would be more at home in that little saloon down the street that’s popular with earnest college sophomores.

Obsessing over Obamacare

Although the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, doesn’t do much to address the gorilla in the room – the preposterously high cost of medical care -- it does help a significant number of Americans, the heretofore uninsured, deal with those costs, and that’s a good thing. And that’s really all it does. But the ACA is now hip deep in misinformation and deliberate politically-driven disinformation about what it is and is not, to the point where its basic attributes have been rendered all but unrecognizable. (Recent surveys show that when people are asked to choose between the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare, they overwhelmingly select the ACA, even though they are one and the same thing. That says it all.)

So let’s take a few steps back and review some of the basics:

One: Health care reform is not some pet cause of Democrats and lefties. Republicans and other conservatives are fully on board with the need for major changes in the way we provide and pay for health care. They – in the person of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and many, many others -- said so repeatedly during the legislative debate over the ACA and have said so many times since. It’s not as if they think the status quo is fine and that Obamacare is a needless intrusion on it. So, the need is there, and that’s something that’s widely agreed upon.

Two: Although they (Boehner, et. al.) enthusiastically endorse the idea that something needs to be done, what they think that is they have not made clear. They have only said Obamacare isn’t it. There is no comprehensive alternative approach on the table. Their only “solution” is to scuttle the one initiative out there that even begins to address the problem they readily acknowledge exists.

Three. No matter how many hairs Obamacare opponents try to split, Romney’s program in Massachusetts is essentially the same thing. So, they were for Obamacare before they were against it. The individual mandate was part of the Massachusetts program and was an idea that was strongly backed by conservatives whose position was that people who didn’t buy in would essentially be freeloaders.

Four: The ACA is not behind rising health care costs and the resultant rise in insurance premiums. Those were skyrocketing back when Obama was still organizing poor folks on the south side of Chicago and Obamacare was not yet a gleam in anyone’s eye. Health insurance premiums have risen almost 200 percent since 1999

Five: Despite the fact that some folks are clearly obsessed with it, it can be argued that the ACA is a relatively minor piece of legislation, not meriting all the hollering and foot-stomping it has engendered on the right. It does not affect the three out of five of us who get our health insurance through our employer, or the one in five of us who get it through Medicare. All it really does is attempt to make insurance more readily available to the one in five of us who don’t have it. That, by most estimates, amounts to about 50 million people, all of whom are one medical catastrophe removed from total financial ruin.

Six: The poorly implemented web-based process for enrolling in the program was not the same thing as the program itself, despite critics’ efforts to conflate the two. Their righteous indignation over problems with enrolling in a program they disdain was laughable. And in any case, the botched rollout of the enrollment Web site is over with and soon forgotten, and will stay that way no matter how hard and how many times Obamacare critics try to resuscitate it.

Seven: Some insurance companies canceled policies which they had sold but which didn’t comply with the new law, rendering inaccurate the president’s assurances that people could keep any policy they were happy with. It’s something of a mystery, though, why those companies – instead of precipitously canceling non-compliant policies upon implementation of the law -- didn’t communicate with the affected policyholders long beforehand, warn them of impending problems, and offer up alternatives.

Eight: It should be unnecessary to point this out because it’s all so nonsensical, but here goes: The Affordable Care Act is not a commie plot. It is not a government takeover of health care. It is not socialized medicine. It has nothing to do with socialism. Obamacare does not employ doctors or operate hospitals or provide insurance. It funnels people to insurance companies -- private enterprise – which then, in the finest tradition of free markets everywhere, compete for their business.

The high cost of health care is a terrible problem, and the Obama administration, and before that the Clinton administration, were right in giving it high priority. It puts millions of Americans on the brink of financial catastrophe and/or deprives them of medical care altogether, it exercises undo influence over where and how we live and work and what we do for a living, and it sucks billions of dollars to itself at the expense of all other sectors of the economy. The ACA doesn’t directly address all of that, but can be seen as a start. Whatever else happens, the creation, passage, and implementation of it guarantees continued and intensifying focus on this huge national problem. Obsessing over Obamacare, and distorting what it is and isn’t, is politically driven and does nothing to solve a problem all Americans share.

The N-Word

That we have commonly substituted the phrase “the n-word” for the word itself – the word “nigger” -- is testimony to its awesome negative power; its anger, its poison, its snarling ugliness.  When we’ve wanted or needed to refer to it in speech or print, because of its malignant toxicity we’ve recoiled in disgust from saying it aloud or putting it in print, and instead substituted a kind of  juvenile code-speak. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

But these days, apparently…not so much.  Hold the lipstick…behold the pig.

The suspension of professional football player Richie Incognito for, among other things, tossing the word around all too freely, has unleashed a surprising (to me, anyway) and regrettable outpouring of affection and support for it, along with the depressing realization that its full-monte use, disdained by all but slack-jawed, vacant-eyed mouth-breathers (or so I thought), has enjoyed an apparent resurgence.  Little did I know that its use in athletic locker rooms was as common as we now know it to be, and that it had so many enthusiastic defenders, among both blacks and whites, as evidenced by comments from Charles Barkley, Michael Wilbon, Matt Barnes, Paula Deen, Shaquille O’Neal and others.

Maybe it’s fortuitous that this new debate about the appropriateness of the word “nigger” raises its ugly head at about the same time as we celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  In it, Lincoln refers in the very first sentence to the “proposition that all men are created equal” a phrase, and a sentiment, that Americans purportedly hold dear and take seriously, and which, by itself, gives lie to the notion that it makes sense to lump an entire class of people together with one dismissive and derogatory word.

But there are other parts of the Gettysburg Address that are even more on-point.  Much that follows that first sentence speaks to the deaths that resulted from the Civil War – 10,000 at Gettysburg alone.

“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives…”

“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here…”

“…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…”

“…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The message that Lincoln’s words conveyed so elegantly and eloquently, and sorrowfully, was that so many people died in this awful conflagration, and for what?  What cause was worth such upheaval and carnage? What principle was the confederacy defending that justified the unutterable misery, destruction, and death the Civil War brought  -- the south sent to war and thereby brought about the deaths of 258,000 of its own sons and 360,000 of its adversary’s?

What was it all for?

Answer: The defense and preservation by southerners of a system by which they enriched themselves through the use of free labor to produce their goods and services – free labor they availed themselves of by enslaving hundreds of thousands of their fellow human beings; a system that treated blacks as a sub-human species, to be bought and sold as if they were cattle or furniture, to be kept in chains, to be capriciously and forever separated from their kith and kin, to be understood as possessions, not people, to be whipped, shot, beaten, maimed, and slaughtered; to be not cared for and loved but owned; to be literally worked to death.

And the word of choice for these southerners to identify the people to whom they did these things and whom they perceived not as people but as commodities:  nigger.

That, in a nutshell, is the history and provenance of that awful word, and it has been used ever since as a way to forcefully and without equivocation convey hatred and naked contempt.  Its use has accompanied, among other things, vilification and denigration, total denial of basic human rights, economic oppression, unspeakable brutality, rapes, hangings, and lynchings. It contemptuously lumps together people tall and short, young and old, male and female, rich and poor. smart and dumb, handsome and ugly, strong and weak, talented and talentless, skilled and unskilled, educated and ignorant, athletic and ungainly, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts  --all as one thing – dark of skin and therefore valueless.

That is some strong and potent – and dangerous -- word.

Nor has the word “nigger” lost any of its malignant potency over time. It’s never funny or cute, or an ironic term of endearment, a usage Barkley and others think older folks and the hyper-sensitive can’t comprehend. As columnist Jason Whitlock put it: “The N-word is a not a generational issue. The N-word was never a fad. It was a primary tool in the enslavement, disenfranchisement and cultural destruction of a race of people.”

In some African-American circles, use of “nigger” is embraced and defended, in an exquisite irony, on the grounds that refraining from using it constitutes being told what to say and what not to say by The Man; or that it’s used only in a jocular way; or that’s it’s used only to describe a certain type of person; or that it’s long-since been stripped of its toxicity.  Thus, this reasoning holds, it’s certainly okay for black people to use it if they want to, and it’s even okay, in certain circumstances, for whites to use it. And whites who are so inclined will see that as a license to join in the fun.  But make no mistake. When a white person uses the word “nigger,” without exception he is using it in exactly the same way white people have always used it.

You can’t ban a word.  The only hope is that the people who toss it around so freely and who keep ginning up excuses for it will come to see it for what it is: crass and insulting terminology that carries a boatload of ugly baggage and is an important facilitator of the racial stereotyping that continues to bedevil African-American everywhere.

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The Bureaucracy Did It

In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank expresses doubts about the claim that the president didn’t know until recently about NSA spying activities involving other countries’ leaders.  “It strains credulity to think that the U.S. was spying on world leaders without the president’s knowledge,” Milbank wrote.  He is not alone in his skepticism.  I, on the other hand – given the size, power, complexity, and self-preservation instincts of your average government bureaucracy, particularly those involved in any way with national security – would be amazed if the president did know what was going on.  This president or any president.

The NSA wasn’t tapping into Angela Merkel’s cell phone chats because it was trying to gather intelligence that would help defend the United States.  It was tapping into her phone because it could.  What spy organizations are capable of doing, they do.  And they may or may not tell anyone about it.  Imagine NSA operatives (or whatever you call them) upon discovering, as the technology evolved, that they could listen in on the conversations of the world’s heads of state, including those of our allies:  “It’s so cool that we can do that, but it wouldn’t be right and there’s nothing to be gained from it.  So even though we can, we won’t.”

Um, no.

Given the bazillion things the NSA watches, listens to, and otherwise monitors, and given the fact that it’s a vast bureaucracy whose job is (a) spying, and (b) keeping secrets, it is entirely plausible that it was listening to plenty of people, heads of state included, without telling the president or anybody else.  Milbank quotes an AP reporter asking the question, “Was the president kept out of the loop about what the NSA was doing?” The answer is yes, in a manner of speaking. But I would suggest that there is no loop; that NSA people decide what the president, and, for that matter, the congress and even their own bosses need to know when it comes to the multitude of spying activities the organization indulges in.  They don’t do this in a seditious way.  They do it in more of a this-is-nobody-else’s-business  way.

Deciding who’s going to know what is something the NSA has in common with all Washington mega-bureaucracies which all have, in effect, a life of their own.  They know that they are permanent and that politicians are, for the most part – particularly those in the executive branch – transitory.  The bureaucrats know that long after the president and his minions have departed the scene and turned their attention to foundations and libraries, they and their impenetrable machinery will still be there.  They listen and smile as politicians vow to end waste, fraud, and abuse, and then they get back to business.  Job One for them is not serving the needs of the American people, but self preservation and perpetuation. Just as an example of how big, powerful, and immovable these agencies are, the smallest of the cabinet-level departments, Education, has 5,000 employees and a budget of about $70-billion.  The president doesn’t spend his evenings going over DOE’s contracts.  The idea that the congress and/or the executive branch are on top of everything the bureaucracies are doing is an illusion.  (They tend to be on top of those matters only insofar as they can influence spending that benefits their friends, relatives, contributors, and, ultimately, themselves.)

Republicans and other irrational Obama-haters aren’t sure which rap to try to pin on Obama to get the most political mileage out of this spying affair: Spying on friends? Spying on friends but not knowing about it?  Spying on friends, knowing about it, but lying about knowing about it.  You can pick only one.  The likely reality, though, is that friends were pointlessly spied on but it wasn’t the president’s fault.  The bureaucracy did it.  Meanwhile, what we’re all pretty sure of is that everybody spies on everybody else and that foreign politicians, allies of the U.S. or not, whether they're tapping the U.S. president's phone or not, know they’ll never lose any votes by vowing to their constituents that they won’t stand still for being pushed around by America.

Redskins

The existence of team mascot names in sports is, of course, a little silly.  When we watch a game, we can plainly see that the participants are people and not big jungles cats, little red songbirds, or venomous snakes. But we cut the whole idea some slack because it’s been that way in competitive team sports for a long time and, even though we know it’s a bit goofy to linguistically convert ordinary people into birds and bad-ass animals, we take it with a grain of salt.

But there are some names we need to give more careful consideration to.

For those who consider the controversy surrounding Washington’s NFL team to have been manufactured by the excessively politically correct  – just another cause fueled by liberal hypersensitivity and not worth worrying about-- imagine your 5-year-old coming home from school and announcing that he’s made a new friend.

“Great!  What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Jones.  He sits right behind me.  He’s a redskin!”

Some may see this usage as being not quite as poisonous as an announcement by your kid that his new friend was a nigger or a spic or a kike, but it certainly shares the coarse and degrading spirit of those snarlingly ugly labels.  Unless you’re a member of that thankfully small segment of society that uses this sort of language routinely and means it, you would be at least taken aback by this use of the word redskin.

 

You would chalk it up to innocence and ignorance and you would set the lad straight regarding the use of perjorative racial terminology.  And you would do that not because you’re excessively touchy about such things but because you are a decent member of a society that finds those sorts of usages ignorant, impolite, uncivil, and possibly dangerous.  In short, you would not be accused of being overly sensitive should you gasp at your child’s use of the word redskin to identify and describe a fellow human being.

And so it is with the controversy over the Washington Redskins name.  It seems fair to say that people are not being overly sensitive when they question the use of an appellation for a football team that would immediately be deemed an unacceptable racial slur when it came out of the mouth of a kid. 

Washington fans who want to keep the name because they're just really, really attached to it need to get a life.  Do they really, truly care what animal, vegetable, or mineral the team is called? Or are they going to seriously argue, as the team’s owner has, that to renounce an ugly and pointless racial insult is something that shouldn’t be done because it would defile a venerated tradition? 

This is, really, a no-brainer  -- not number one on the world problem list, but a fix that is simple to do and simple to understand why.

Somewhat more subtle considerations surround the names Braves and Indians, but they would seem to have at least one foot on the same slippery slope, if only because they seem intended to convey ferocity and aggressiveness in the same way that animal names do – Tigers, Lions, Bears, Wildcats, Bulldogs, etc.  As team names, they are less overtly perjorative than Redskins, but they are still tone-deaf, in the same way that names like the San Francisco Jews or the Dallas African-Americans would be. We will see what, if anything, happens in Cleveland and Atlanta. 

Here is a discussion in Wikipedia on the use of Native American names as team mascots, including a short history of organizations that have changed their name.

Figuring Out What Republicans Want

A reliable source says the following conversation has been taking place behind closed doors in recent weeks:

Boehner/McConnell:  We want you to shoot your dog, and if you don’t shoot your dog we’re going to shut down the government and destroy the economy.

Obama:  My dog!?  What does my dog have to do with it?

Boehner/McConnell:  We don’t like your dog.  We want him dead.  And there’s a group of crazy people in the House, representing an equally crazy constituency, maybe even crazier, whom we have succeeded in convincing that your dog is the devil’s spawn.  Maybe convincing them of that wasn’t such a great idea, but it’s done now and we can’t really do anything about it.

Obama:  My dog is not the devil’s spawn  He’s a perfectly good dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, these people think he is the devil’s spawn and, in fact, they are completely obsessed with him.  They are absolutely willing to bring about the end of civilization as we know it to get rid of him…to destroy the village in order to save it, you might say.  So, you need to shoot your dog.

Obama:  Well, I’m not shooting my dog.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then, cut off his tail and one leg.  Maybe we can convince the gang of 40 that he will then be incapacitated enough to not be able to ruin the country like he was going to.  He's a job killer and he's not fair to the American people.  We're not sure what that means, but it's our talking point with regard to your dog.  It's what we say.

Obama:  I’m not shooting my dog or cutting off any of his parts.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, can’t we at least have a conversation about this?

Obama:  No, we can’t have a conversation about killing or maiming my dog in exchange for not destroying the U.S. economy.

Boehner/McConnell:  Okay, then we’ll have to tell the country that the president refuses to negotiate.  Country, the president refuses to negotiate!

Obama:  That’s not negotiation.  That’s blackmail.  It’s like saying give us what we want and no one gets hurt.  You can’t threaten to bring the economy to its knees if you don’t get your way, and call that negotiating.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, you know what – this whole business of default causing dire economic consequences is overblown anyway. Rep.Ted Yoho has said default would actually bring stability to the world markets, and a lot of our wing-nuts agree with him. True, Ted isn't an economist.  He's actually a veterinarian. But anyway, that's the story we're going with now, or at least one of them...that a default would be no big deal. 

Obama: So what about the dog? 

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, our crazy people are every bit as obsessed with government spending as they are your dog, so now we’re threatening to cause a default if government spending isn’t cut.  And default would be a very bad thing.  Except that it wouldn’t be.  But don’t think we’ve forgotten about your dog.  We still want you to shoot him – or we want somebody to shoot him.  But maybe we’ll take care of that later.

Obama:  So what exactly do you want in exchange for re-opening the government and not destroying the economy – which, by the way, every reputable thinker from the Wall Street Journal to Warren Buffett says might well be the result of a default.

Boehner/McConnell:  Well, we’re not exactly sure what we want.As our esteemed colleague Marlin Stutzman so eluquently put it: "We're not going to be disrespected.  We have to get something out of this.  And I don't know what that even is."  In other words, if you disrespect us we'll ruin the world. But we definitely plan on getting that dog of yours shot.  Our wacko-birds want that, and they’ll can us if we don’t get it done.  And that’s the most important thing -- that we don’t get canned.

Gingrich:  Boy, you just can’t deal with that Obama guy like you could with Clinton.  We made a perfectly reasonable offer – shoot your dog and we won’t shut down the government and bring down the economy – and what does he say?  He says no!  You just can’t work with a guy like that.

Guns and the Mentally Ill

Without getting into the ins and outs of firearms legislation and the entrenched positions of the ideologues that come at this from left and right, can there be any doubt that we have to find a way to keep the unhinged and guns separate? It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there.  

But on that relatively limited objective – keeping guns out of the hands of the delusional – is where the focus needs to be if the depressingly regular front page appearance of mass shooting news is ever going to stop.  The quixotic efforts of the left to rid society of guns altogether, or at the very least, guns whose appearance they disapprove of – viz., so-called “assault” weapons -- are politically impossible and doomed to failure.  Worse, they drain energy and focus away from gun control efforts that might actually do some good and that there is some possibility of getting all parties to agree on – the more narrow but reachable objective of stopping mentally unbalanced people from playing out their revenge fantasies with bullets.

Every bit as futile (and nonsensical) as the left’s obsession with the impossible or the irrelevant is the insistence by the right, as personified by the National Rifle Association, that a gun in every American hand is a constitutional imperative, and that any effort whatsoever to regulate guns, including keeping them away from felons, insane people, and small children, is the camel’s nose under the tent.  (In this connection, it’s worth mentioning that we already have a considerable amount of gun control legislation on the books: Automatic weapons – machine guns – are heavily regulated, and you can’t have bazookas, hand grenades, or surface-to-air missiles, to name just a few.  No one – okay, hardly anyone -- considers these prohibitions violations of the right to bear arms.)

It can be argued that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, et. al. is by definition mentally ill.  At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire. Which is to say, these events are virtually always connected to mental illness of some type and/or severity. And so like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows the shootings.  And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected.

Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in this effort, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible.  It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment. True believers on the left and the right should quit worrying about unserious ideas like no guns or more guns and put their efforts behind something that can actually happen and that can do some good.

"Income Inequality" and the Tax Code

In their regular swoons of late about “income inequality” it appears that many editorial writers are only now discovering these two facts about economies throughout history and throughout the world: (1) People do not all make the same amount of money; (2) there are far fewer rich people than not-rich people.  I assume that when they talk about income inequality, they understand that its opposite is income equality –  a state of affairs in which all people make the same amount of money. How they think that would work, and why they think it would be desirable, is anybody’s guess.  (If that’s not what they mean by the term, then they should let us know what they do mean.  Please be specific.) *

Anyway, my suspicion is that in their finely honed sense of moral superiority, what they’re really doing is conflating what they call income inequality with unfairness in the tax code. And the latter might well be a legitimate beef.  We citizens pool our money in the form of taxes to buy for ourselves collectively things we want and need but which would be impractical to buy individually, including national defense, schools, roads and bridges, police and fire protection, libraries, parks, sewers, dog catchers, air traffic control and much, much more.  There’s a big difference between being skeptical of big government, which is sensible, and being anti-government and inflexibly anti-tax, which is childish. 

When taxation is understood as a burden -- one that needs to be shared as equally as possible --  in the absence of a carefully graduated tax code, and one that’s free of the sorts of loopholes that only a certain segment of the population can take advantage of, the burden is impossibly heavy for some and nearly non-existent for others, even though everyone shares more or less equally in what those taxes buy.  Understood that way, the fact that people who make above a certain income pay, in the aggregate, a certain percentage of the total tax bill has little meaning.

Net: Income inequality isn’t the problem and railing against it just muddies the waters.  Fairness in taxation, on the other hand, is something that always needs scrutiny.

* While acknowledging that interest groups from all sides offer up opinions based on various sets of "facts," I would submit that it's sensible to at least examine the statistical evidence -- to rely on at least some semblance of a factual basis -- in discussing this issue. There is considerable evidence that the perception (and condemnation) of income inequality is driven by ideology and class resentment and operates in a fact-free zone. It is in this spirit that I offer the following article by Bill Knapp, a managing director at the political consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker:
 

Middle class is moving forward, not backward

By Bill Knapp, Published: January 15

Bill Knapp is a managing director at the political consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker and has been a media strategist to five presidential and numerous other political campaigns.

As the presidential election heats up, we’re hearing a lot about what’s wrong in America. But the rhetoric doesn’t match reality. Amazingly good things are happening in our country. Let’s consider just a few of the topics that people typically point to as “problem areas” — jobs, inequality, education and poverty — and see why there is cause for hope.

First, America is a job-creation machine. From 1950 to 2010 the number of full- and part-time workers in the United States rose by 92 million. Over that period, while our population doubled, our workforce increased 2.47 times. Essentially, we are creating more jobs than people.

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But here’s the amazing fact. Our job market has accommodated over 40 million more women in the workforce since 1960. The number of full-time, year-round women in the workforce has grown more than 350 percent, to 42.8 million workers, according to 2010 Census data. And the median income for year-round female workers has increased to $42,839, about $5,000 short of full-time, year-round male workers at $47,715. Since 1967, the year the Census Bureau started to report these data, women in the workforce have grown by 27.7 million jobs, men by 19.7 million. Women are the big winners in terms of job growth.

Yet we barely notice this remarkable job growth record and transformative social phenomenon.

There is a lot of talk about the “99 percent” vs. the “1 percent.” The rich have always been disproportionate owners of the total wealth. But an entire intellectual and political infrastructure is used to exaggerate and distort income disparity. A fact from the 2010 Census: Since 1967, median household income has grown in all income levels above $75,000 and has decreased in all income levels below that threshold. The largest increase is among those making $100,000 to $149,999 a year — a threefold increase. Those in the highest quintile account for 50.2 percent of total U.S. household income, with a mean of $169,633. That share of household income was 43.6 percent in 1967 and in 2001 broke the 50 percent mark. Should we be concerned by this consolidation of wealth? Maybe. But we’re not quite in need of the French Revolution. Another often-cited “proof” of inequality in America is the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent. In 1968 it was 11 percent; in 1988, 15 percent; and, according to the IRS, in 2008 it was 21 percent.

As of 2009, it had fallen to 17 percent. There is widespread misunderstanding about whom the top 1 percent of earners really means. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, in 2011 the 1 percenter made $532,613 in annual cash income. In 2004, the 1 percent made $459,247 cash income. When you adjust for family size, the top 1 percent made, on average, $335,779 a year. This is not small change, but it’s a far cry from the Robber Barons and the inequality of the Gilded Age.

If there is an income divide in America it is over education, and this makes sense: People who are better educated should make more money. The 2010 Census shows that since 2002, among those 25 or older, the number of people with a bachelor’s degree rose 16 percent, to 47.7 million. The median income for a male with a bachelor’s degree or more is $63,265. That same cohort with full-time employment increases the median to $71,778.

Education pays. In 1979, the median income of college graduates was 36 percent more than high school graduates. In 2010, the median income for a college grad was over 79 percent more than his high school counterpart, according the Census Bureau. And here is the real, hidden optimistic point: As a nation we have never been better educated. In 1940, only a quarter of Americans 25 and older had achieved a high school degree or higher. In 2009, that number was close to 90 percent. The increase in the percentage of Americans who have had some college experience rose from 10 percent in 1940 to 56 percent in 2009.

College enrollment as a whole was projected to be 20.6 million in 2010, higher than any previous year. The real growth, however, is in online education, which has become an affordable alternative to typical brick-and-mortar colleges. According to a 2010 report by the Sloan Consortium, the number of students enrolled in online learning increased 21 percent from 2009 to 2010, compared to 2 percent growth of the overall higher education enrollment. The Western Governors University, a private, nonprofit online college based in Salt Lake City, is growing 20 percent every seven months. The University of Phoenix, a for-profit, open-admission online college, reached a peak enrollment of almost 500,000 students in 2009-10. This growth stems partly from the ease with which students can enroll and complete courses but is mostly due to price. Despite 30 percent annual growth in enrollment, Western Governors U. has increased its tuition only $200 over the past four years.

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The pessimism industry is focused on inequality and poverty. Politically incorrect as it sounds, poverty is driven by a lack of education and by single-parent households. Married couples have a median income of $72,751. Female-headed households with no husband have a median income of $32,031. Some will say that the number of female-only households living in poverty has doubled since 1965, to more than 15 million Americans. But among this cohort, the raw numbers tell a different story: The population of this group of women increased from 16.4 million in 1965 to 46.4 million in 2010 — and the share in poverty decreased from 49 percent to 34.2. We’ve made some progress, though more needs to be done.

In an effort to find a more accurate and complete measure of poverty, the Census Bureau tried an experimental formula last year, in addition to its standard measure, that showed 1 million individuals had pushed up from extreme poverty into near poverty. The poverty rate for children declined from 22 percent to 18.2. That’s 3.2 million children who are no longer living in poverty, according to newer, more-inclusive standards.

Now, let’s look beyond IRS and Census data to other telling facts about our economic growth and future. According to Pew Research Center, 83 percent of American adults owned a cellphone last May, up from 66 percent in January 2005. In 2008, 71 percent of teenagers had cellphones, up from 45 percent in 2004. This is a telling statistic because when more teenagers own luxury electronics, it means there are more families with disposable income — indicating a stronger and wider middle class. In 2008, 77 percent of teens also owned a video-game system, 74 percent owned an iPod and 60 percent owned a computer.

The struggling middle class is getting their teenager cellphones, video-game systems and computers, and they’re going to schools in neighborhoods that have gotten safer in a world that is, broadly speaking, less violent. Steve Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” estimates that deaths caused by war, genocide, purges, war-caused famine and disease counted for only 3 percent of all deaths in the 20th century. The latest FBI national report showed that the estimated volume of violent crimes in 2010 fell 6 percent from 2009. Not bad.

Another sign of health is broadband Internet access. In 2000, shortly after broadband became available, about 4.7 million households had access. By 2009, about 75 million households had access. That’s an amazing accomplishment for the 1 percent and the 99 percent.
These positive trends are present across almost every indicator of a successful middle class. As persons per household is decreasing — from 3.16 in 1969 to 2.66 in 2009 — the number of vehicles per household is increasing, from 1.16 to 1.92, or 66 percent, across the same period. Even accounting for population increases, the growth in number of vehicles owned outstrips the growth in the amount of new drivers by 1¹ / ₂ times. By 2009, there were 1.39 cars for every worker in America.

The bottom line: America’s middle class is still successful. More families own their homes than in any other decade and are by far the best-educated middle class in our history, with ever-expanding access to technology. They have the opportunity to educate their children and prepare them for a great life in a country with a great future. So take that, pessimists.
 

Let's, like, demonstrate

"Occupiers" are coming to the forefront again, and in the predictable life cycle of these uprisings, have entered into their bomb-throwing phase.  Early on in that cycle, the tactics, as is always the case, quickly and permanently supplanted whatever purpose may have been originally envisioned, if one was.  Almost immediately, it became not about the achieving, but about the doing, and predictably devolved into Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  This is okay if you’re a kid; it’s what kids do.  But not if you’re an actual grown-up.  (Movie stars are generally in the former category and so they, too, can be forgiven.) Establishment support for such purposeless and juvenile acting out is mystifying.  What exactly do they think is wrong with Wall Street and "Big Business" that can be addressed by this communal rant? And do they really think it’s a popular cause that has the implicit support of some silent but restive majority out there? The reality is this: Most of the relatively few people who are aware of it in any meaningful way don’t care about it.

The core tenet of the demonstrator/occupier religion is the conviction that something, somehow is being done to them, and if it weren’t for that something, their lives would be better. That’s about it. Their m.o. is to be hostile to, and in high dudgeon about, people who are in some unspecified way connected to money.  And that being the case, the things they say, and shout, and paint on their signs are difficult to refute. “I'm plenty mad, about money things, and, well, a whole bunch of other stuff, too” isn't the sort of thing you can really debate.  Not that they actually want to debate anything, as that would force them to suspend, if only temporarily, their primary activity: the care and feeding of their grand sense of moral superiority and the nurturing of their sense of mission, conveniently unspecific though that mission may be. (This lack of specificity is in vivid contrast to to the moral, and urgent, underpinnings of the causes that gave rise to past major and ongoing demonstrations/occupations -- civil rights for tens of millions of disenfranchised citizens and an end to the disastrous war in Vietnam. Those people were crying out. These people are whining. Big difference.) It's one thing to give them their space and let the thing play itself out. How supportive editorial writers and others see this as being in any way substantive or productive, though, is a mystery. But many apparently do.

Although it’s true that some bankers, lenders, and “Wall Streeters” have played fast and loose with our money – my money – in the recent past, and feloniously in some cases, the demonstrators would do well to keep in mind that it’s not a zero-sum game; money that “greedy” Wall Streeters take in does not come out of the pool available to wage earners and others. They are free to improve upon their circumstances regardless of what Wall Street is or is not up to. They're not poor because other people are rich. As for Big Business, it’s good to remember that it employs tens of millions of people and puts trillions of dollars into the economy, contributing mightily to the general prosperity; and it is owned, in the main, not by moustache-twirling villains but by shareholders, a huge percentage of whom are ordinary folks whose life savings are in those shares.

Speaking of moral superiority, one of the themes it extends to is the idea of inequality of income.  The demonstrators are, apparently, against this, meaning they are presumably for equality of income – or, put another way, they believe everyone should be paid the same amount of money; that it’s “unfair” if some people make more money than other people; that it’s morally wrong for a company president to make more than a cab driver; that there’s a small number of rich people and a large number of not-rich people, and that’s no good. Is that, in fact, what they believe? If not, then what? What does “inequality of income” actually mean? Please be specific.

Although attempts were made to characterize the Wall Street demonstrators as the left’s answer to the Tea Party, what’s striking is not how different these two groups are but how alike they are.  “I don’t have what I want – the job I want, the money I want, the life I want -- and it's somebody else's fault.”  That’s what every placard at the Wall Street protests should read and it’s what every placard at a Tea Party rally should read.  For the protesters, the fault lies with financiers and big business.  For the Tea Party, it’s “the government.”

Tea Partiers believe that their problems – and everybody’s problems – are caused by things the government is or is not doing, and so they want the government to cut it out.  Cut what out, exactly, isn’t clear except, perhaps being “big.”  But as has been the case with political parties and their constituents since the beginning of the Republic, what they really object to is not how big the government is but how it spreads that bigness around.  In other words, they’re in favor of the government spending they’re in favor of, and against the government spending they’re against.  The former category generally includes government spending that directly benefits them, and the latter category spending that does not.Taxation and government spending is not a commie plot.  We citizens pool our money in the form of taxes to buy for ourselves collectively things we want and need but which would be impractical to buy individually, including national defense, schools, roads and bridges, police and fire protection, libraries, parks, sewers, dog catchers, air traffic control and much, much more.  There’s a big difference between being skeptical of big government, which is sensible, and being anti-government, which is childish.

By the way, also included, by way of the will of the people, in the list of things we buy for ourselves through taxation are social security and Medicare.  If the Tea Party is against these programs because they believe them to be “socialistic” then they should step up to that and call openly and vigorously for their repeal -- and take that position to the polls in the next election.  If not, they should cooperate in finding ways to keep the programs healthy instead of confining their contribution to coy references to socialism and Ponzi schemes. 

Most of us working stiffs view the machinations of Washington and Wall Street as curiosities that don’t really affect our ability to live and prosper.  We simply get on with our work and our lives.  The chronic complainers of the left and the right should try it. They are free to improve upon the circumstances of their lives regardless of what “the government” or “Wall Street” is or is not up to, and electing their heroes – shameless demagogues, for the most part – isn’t going to help them at all.