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There Might Be a Limited Supply of Judges Willing to Make a Supreme Court Kamikaze Run

by PalmaOConnor9 Posted on February 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just a quick note about who Obama is going to nominate for the Supreme Court: it has to be someone willing to make a kamikaze run. It’s going to be a grueling experience for nothing, since Republicans will be happy to put the nominee through the wringer but plainly won’t vote to confirm. In fact, it might be for less than nothing. Whoever gets picked probably can’t be renominated if a Democrat wins in November.

Most likely, then, you’re putting yourself through a punishing ordeal in order to ruin your chances of ever getting a Supreme Court seat. That’s the kind of thing a party loyalist might do, but a circuit court judge? What’s the upside?

Anyway, all this is just to say that Obama may have trouble finding someone willing to be nominated. Keep that in mind when you browse through all the lists of potential candidates.

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There Might Be a Limited Supply of Judges Willing to Make a Supreme Court Kamikaze Run

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Let Us Now Praise the Culture Wars

by TawnyaSteinberg Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stephen Prothero has a very odd piece in the LA Times today:

Two surprising conclusions emerge when America’s culture wars — from Jefferson’s heresies to same-sex marriage — are stacked up and weighed together. Conservatives typically start the battles, and liberals almost always win them.

Conservatism is often said to be rooted in a commitment to states’ rights, free markets and limited government. But American conservatives have been for and against all these things at various times. The more consistent idea behind American conservatism is cultural: a form of life is passing away and it is worth fighting to revive and restore it. Driven by this narrative of loss and restoration, culture warriors struggle to resurrect the patriarchal family or Christian America or the homogeneous hometown.

Conservatives typically lose these battles because the causes they select are lost from the start. For example, culture warriors took on Catholics when the Catholic population was mainstreaming and gaining power. They took on same-sex marriage when many gays and lesbians were already out of the closet and accepted by their heterosexual relatives, co-workers and neighbors.

This is backward. Almost by definition—as Prothero acknowledges—conservatives want to keep existing cultural mores in place. It’s liberals who want to change them. Same-sex marriage is a typical case: the United States spent 200 years unanimously believing that it was too absurd even to contemplate. It was gay rights activists, eventually supported by mainstream liberals, who pushed it into the public sphere. Conservatives didn’t fight it before then because there was nothing to fight.

This dynamic isn’t quite universal. The temperance movement, which was generally conservative though a little hard to classify, tried to change a custom that was millennia old. Much more commonly, though, it’s liberals who fight for cultural change. In the postwar era, we’re the ones who started the fights over civil rights; gender equality; prayer in school; abortion; gay rights; voting rights; health care as a basic right; and many others.

Prothero basically says that conservatives take on these movements too late, only after they’ve already started to gain critical mass. That’s why they lose. This is true, but how else could it be? There’s no point in waging a war against something that has no mainstream support and isn’t even a twinkle in the public eye.

And of course, conservatives don’t always lose. Liberals have tried to change the culture around guns, and so far we’ve failed miserably. Drug legalization has made only minuscule progress. And after 70 years, we’re still fighting for truly universal health care.

Nonetheless, the general principle is simple: Liberals start culture fights, and conservatives respond if it looks like we’re starting to succeed. Beyond being the simple truth, it’s also something liberals should be proud of. There’s a lot of enduring unfairness in society, and the main reason I count myself a liberal in the first place is because we’re the ones who fight like hell to bring public attention to this and work to change it. Why would any liberal not gladly accept this?

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Let Us Now Praise the Culture Wars

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Liberals Are Heading Down the Path of Fox News. It’s Time to Knock It Off.

by CaitlynWeatherf Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the past few weeks I’ve written five posts making the following points:

  1. The acting Oscars are not really all that white.
  2. Flint is not a public health holocaust.
  3. The 1994 crime bill didn’t create mass incarceration.
  4. Photo ID laws probably don’t have massive turnout effects.
  5. Social welfare spending has gone up a lot over the past three decades, and welfare reform had very little impact on either this or the deep poverty rate.

I’m not really very excited about writing stuff like this. I generally prefer to use my emotional energy fighting conservatives and boosting liberal causes. On the other hand, facts and realism matter. I don’t want to see my side adopt the habits that we mock so mercilessly in conservatives.

One of the things that bothered me in all five cases is that these points could all be made perfectly well with the truth. The non-acting Oscars really have shut out minorities almost completely. Lead poisoning of children really is a serious problem. The 1994 crime bill may not have been responsible for mass incarceration, but it had plenty of other problems—though they turned out have a pretty modest effect in the end. Photo ID laws do have modest but pervasive effects on minority voting, and in a 50-50 country this can make a big difference. And social welfare spending may have gone up a lot, but it still hasn’t made much of a dent in poverty.

What to think of this? Maybe it’s just coincidence that I’ve noticed a bunch of items like this recently. After all, everyone in the political arena, friends and foes alike, has long used hyperbole as a way of marshaling action. Human nature being what it is, people just won’t pay much attention to measured and nuanced debate. You have to hit them over their heads to get their attention, and sometimes that means going overboard on the outrage if you want to make a difference in the world.

And in the end, what’s worse? Generating a lightly misleading meme about acting Oscars being white—because actors are the only part of the film industry that most people know or care about—or doing nothing and gaining no attention for the fact that behind the camera Hollywood remains lily white? That’s not always an easy question to answer.

Still, that’s me talking my book. When this kind of thing starts to define a movement, you end up with Fox News and the tea party. We should be loath to go too far down that road. Being reality-based matters, even if it’s not always entirely on your side.

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Liberals Are Heading Down the Path of Fox News. It’s Time to Knock It Off.

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

by LonnieMarino Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Of “apparently natural” causes during the night. This is going to set up an unbelievable battle in the Senate. I wonder if Republicans will even make a pretense of seriously considering whoever President Obama nominates?

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Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia Has Died

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

by Candida9950 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The 1994 crime bill has come in for a lot of attention lately, and even Bill and Hillary Clinton have said they now regret some of its provisions. But which ones?

Generally speaking, liberals still applaud several of its biggest accomplishments: the assault weapon ban, the Violence Against Women Act, and the COPS program that funded additional police and better community training.

But Republicans exacted a price for this. In particular, they wanted an expansion of the death penalty and several provisions that stiffened sentencing of felons. As it turns out, though, Republicans didn’t have a very good idea of what their own favorite policies would actually accomplish. Are you surprised? For example, here’s the death penalty:

The crime bill created lots of new capital crimes, but its actual effect was nil. The death penalty was already losing support by 1994, and has been banned by an increasing number of states ever since. On the federal level, death sentences have always been a tiny fraction of the total (around four or five per year), and that didn’t change after 1994.

So what about sentencing? The crime bill did have an effect here, but it was generally pretty modest. Here are a couple of charts from an unpublished review of the law seven years after it passed:

Why the small effect? In the case of 3-strikes, it simply didn’t affect very many people. It did increase average time served by several months, but that’s about it. And the much-loathed Truth-in-Sentencing provisions had even less effect. This is because more than half the states already had TIS requirements even before the 1994 bill passed, and not many passed new ones as a result of the law. It did push up the trend in incarceration and time served by a few tenths of a percentage point, but that had only a minuscule effect on overall incarceration rates.

The crime bill also included a few other witless measures, like reducing educational opportunities for inmates, and it unquestionably contributed to the crime hysteria that was prevalent at the time. Nonetheless, its most hated features never had a big effect.

Two years later Clinton also signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which had some pretty objectionable changes to habeas corpus. This was arguably worse than anything in the 1994 bill, but it didn’t have a substantial overall effect on incarceration rates.

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Weekend Follow-Up #2: The 1994 Crime Bill and Mass Incarceration

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

by RogelioUnderwood Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’d forgotten about this even though I wrote about it two years ago, but here’s yet another chart about “deep poverty”:

In this case, deep poverty is defined as households with income under 50 percent of the poverty line (about $10,000 for a family of three). The calculation is based on more accurate measures of poverty that have since been endorsed by the Census Bureau.

Now, this is a different measure of poverty than the one used by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer that I noted yesterday. Their measure is both tighter (looking at even lower poverty rates) and looser (it counts households that are in extreme poverty even for short times). So it’s not entirely an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, once you look at the historical numbers, it doesn’t look like the 1996 welfare reform act slowed down the growth of welfare spending, nor did it have more than a very small effect on deep poverty.

None of this is especially meant to defend welfare reform. But 20 years later, it doesn’t look like it really had quite the catastrophic impact that a lot of people were afraid of at the time.

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Weekend Follow-Up #1: Welfare Reform and Deep Poverty

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

by AXIJacinto Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hey, look what I got. That’s right: I’ve completed MoJo’s required course on sexual harassment, no longer limited just to supervisors.

This doesn’t have much practical value, since I work at home and have no one to harass even if I wanted to. Nonetheless, I was eager to take the course. You see, I’m immersed in opinions about PC culture and diversity and the idiocy of it all etc. etc. But I have no personal experience of it. If you’re talking about schools, I graduated 40 years ago and I have no kids. If you’re talking about Silicon Valley or Wall Street, I have no clue about either. If you’re talking about workplace harassment, it never really came up at any of my previous jobs, and I haven’t participated in an actual workplace since 2001.

So how was it? Pretty boring, really. If someone rejects your advances repeatedly, back off. Don’t fire someone for rejecting you. Don’t go into a woman’s cubicle a dozen times of day to take a deep sniff. (Yes, that was a real example.) Don’t spend three hours a day watching hardcore porn in your office. Don’t go around telling black people they’re “articulate” or Asian people that “of course” they’re good at math. Don’t lose your temper. Talk out your problems. Don’t be an asshole.

Of course I, along with almost everyone who reads this blog, is an overeducated know-it-all who finds all this stuff trivially obvious. That’s not true of everyone by a long way, and stuff like this is probably useful for them. This was also a pretty breezy course, not like the 8-hour sessions that are apparently required at some places. (I guess. How would I know?)

Bottom line: I didn’t learn much, but I suppose plenty of people would. And it really wasn’t very onerous. Mostly just common sense, not lefty indoctrination. So what’s everyone complaining about?

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

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Hooray! A Brand New Site For Creating Lots of Charts About Democracy.

by Aubrey0290 Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The world is awash in charts these days. It’s a great example of a simple proposition of economics: when something gets cheaper to produce, we produce a lot more of it. Just as computers turned a dozen daily pieces of mostly useful snail mail into hundreds of mostly useless emails, they’ve turned data laboriously collected by experts and then laboriously converted into clunky bars and lines by the art department into colorful masterpieces that can be created by pretty much everyone at the push of a button or a modest investment in learning Excel. Half the charts I produce for this blog come either directly from my good friends at the St. Louis Fed or indirectly by downloading their handy datasets into Excel.

There are lots of sites that produce charts these days, with new ones popping up all the time. Joshua Tucker points us today to V-Dem, which provides “15 million data points on democracy, including 39 democracy-related indices.” The V-Dem website tells us that it is “a collaboration among more than 50 scholars worldwide which is co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA.” So let’s take a look.

V-Dem is pretty easy to use: pick one or more countries, one or more variables, and a time period. Click “Generate Graph” and you’re off. So let’s take a look at a few that I drew more or less at random. Here’s #1:

That’s peculiar, isn’t it? We’re used to thinking of the United States as the king of money in politics, but we’re actually the steady blue line right in the middle. Italy apparently spends more than us and Germany spends a lot more. But in the 2000s, Germany plummeted down to middle and Sweden skyrocketed up to the middle. By 2013 we were all pretty much the same.

Of course, I have no idea what this is based on. In theory, I could download the codebook and eventually decipher the data sources, but you can probably guess what the odds of that are. So for now it remains a bit of a mystery. Here’s #2:

This one is less surprising. It tells us that in the mid-1900s American political parties weren’t very cohesive. Then around 1980 they started to become much more cohesive, looking more and more like parliamentary parties in Europe. Oddly, though, V-Dem thinks that Democrats and Republicans got a bit less cohesive around 2005. This contradicts the conventional wisdom enough that it might be worth someone’s while to look into it. #SlatePitch, anyone? Here’s #3:

Sweden and Germany are the winners here, unsurprisingly. But the US does pretty well too. We’ve gone from a distant fourth place in 1972 (among the seven countries shown) to a close tie for first. Of course, everyone else has gotten a lot better too. In fact, if you want to zoom way in for the details and take a glass-half-empty approach to things, we’re actually in last place now. We were doing pretty well until 1993, but since then we’ve made almost no progress. Once again, if this is true it would be interesting to investigate. What happened in 1993 to suddenly blunt the rise of women’s participation in politics?

So that’s that. On the upside, there’s a lot of data here and it’s pretty easy to generate colorful charts out of it. It’s interesting too. Three out of three random charts that I created instantly posed challenges to the received wisdom that might benefit from further study. On the downside, it’s difficult to figure out the source of the indices or to download the data series themselves unless you’re willing to download the entire dataset and load it into your statistical app of choice. That makes further study hard for non-experts. Nothing’s perfect, I guess.

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Hooray! A Brand New Site For Creating Lots of Charts About Democracy.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

by AltonMrudqqjhwc Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just look at our little lovebirds. So adorable. So innocent looking. In reality, of course, they are just furry little batteries, recharging for their next romp around the house. In the meantime, though, Hilbert and Hopper remind you not to forget Valentine’s Day. Buy your loved one some treats this weekend. Treats are good.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 February 2016

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

by KirkWainwright Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our good friends at the Tax Policy Center have now analyzed—if that’s the right word—the tax plans of Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. You can get all the details at their site, but if you just want the bottom line, you’ve come to the right place.

The chart on the left shows who benefits the most from each tax plan. Unsurprisingly, they’re all about the same: middle income taxpayers would see their take-home pay go up 3 or 4 percent, while the rich would see it go up a whopping 10-17 percent. On the deficit side of things, everyone’s a budget buster. Rubio and Bush would pile up the red ink by $7 trillion or so (over ten years) while Trump would clock in at about $9 trillion. That compares to a current national debt of $14 trillion.

No one will care, of course, and no one will even bother questioning any of them about this. After all, we already know they’ll just declare that their tax cuts will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. They can say it in their sleep. Then Trump will say something stupid, or Rubio will break his tooth on a Twix bar, and we’ll move on.

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Republican Tax Plans Will Be Great for the Ri—zzzzz

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