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Is America’s Most Controversial Education Group Changing Its Ways?

by LillianHefner Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Audrey Pribnow, with Teach for America, leads her class at University Academy in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Tammy Ljungblad/TNS/ZUMAPRESS.com

Last weekend, Teach for America, the nonprofit that places freshly minted college graduates in schools to teach for two years, held a national summit in Washington, DC, to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The event featured a number of the organization’s most celebrated alumni who helped build today’s education reform movement—known for its passion for testing, ranking of teachers, and deep support of charter schools. Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor was there; so was Eva Moskowitz, the head of the largest chain of charter schools in New York City, and Michael Johnson, the Colorado senator who helped pass one of the early laws mandating the use of test scores in teachers’ evaluations.

As soon as the summit began, Teach for America’s zealous supporters and fierce critics took to Twitter. “Please tell me that somebody is protesting this awful, anti-public education conference,” writer and author, Nikhil Goyal, tweeted. Joel Klein, a former superintendent of New York schools who now works for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, tweeted, “Teach for America has produced more great leaders fighting for educational equity than any other.” Teach for America alum Gary Rubenstein launched a #FactCheckTFA25 hashtag that he said would deflate many of the organizations’ exaggerations about its successes.

It’s hard to think of an education reform organization today that is more well-known and more divisive than Teach for America. Many advocates say Teach for America is on the front lines of fighting educational inequity and racism by sending top talent to the most struggling classrooms; opponents charge that Teach for America sends poorly trained teachers into schools with high rates of kids in poverty that need qualified teachers the most. Opponents also argue the organization’s elite recruits often displace veteran black and Latino teachers.

In the last three years, a stream of articles and open letters from Teach for America alums have fanned the flames. In 2013, Olivia Blanchard published an essay in The Atlantic, “I Quit Teach for America,” in which she declared that the five-week summer crash course that she—a typical Teach for America recruit—took before being placed in a school didn’t prepare her to fix the wrongs in the most challenging classrooms. That same year, Gary Rubenstein, a former recruiter for Teach for America, wrote an open letter to Wendy Kopp, the founder of the nonprofit, stating that the previous 2010 summit made him ashamed of the organization: “It was disappointing to me that the theme of the summit was generally about how charter schools were THE answer and how ‘bad’ teachers and unions are THE problem. It felt like TFA was trying to convey the idea that ‘We figured it out. Now we just have to scale up,’ despite the fact that nobody has really conclusively figured ‘it’ out.”

A number of studies conducted over the past 10 years have suggested that Teach for America educators have been no more effective raising children’s test scores than teachers from all other avenues (though studies show Teach for America educators, compared with other teachers, have increased kids’ math scores slightly more than their reading and writing scores, according to journalist Dana Goldstein). Studies have also shown that there can be negative impacts from high teacher turnover, and others have called into question the impact of “no excuses” pedagogical approaches that can be found in charter schools.

Such findings—and the drop in the numbers of new applicants for Teach for America—have sparked an unprecedented debate within the organization and have led the organization to create a slew of new initiatives. Teach for American now has pilot programs to help teachers stay in the profession longer and programs to expand training time beyond the five-week summer courses. There is a new educational justice training program that draws on scholarship by African American scholars, including Gloria Ladson-Billings and Lisa Delpit, to help corps members create more culturally relevant classrooms. For the first time, Teach for America alum and critic Amber H. Kim facilitated a panel at the DC summit for the organization’s opponents titled, “Critics, Not Haters.”

Christina Torres joined Teach for America in 2008. She teaches English at the University Laboratory School, Honolulu, Hawai’i. Image by Marc Marquez.

Honolulu-based English teacher and Teach for America alum Christina Torres told me that the nonprofit is now far too large to view it as a one-dimensional organization. The organization represents a huge variety of beliefs. Today there are about 11,000 Teach for America educators who are still teaching in the classroom. And the new corps members are more diverse in class and race: Close to half of the 2015 corps are people of color, and 47 percent of them come from low-income or working-class backgrounds.

Torres, who refers to herself as “Mexipina” (her father is Mexican and her mother is Filipino), now has over four years of teaching under her belt. For the past two years, she has worked in a progressive, integrated charter school serving Asian American, Samoan, and Native Hawaiian students and kids from Guam. Last weekend, in between Teach for America panels, I asked her about this year’s summit.

Mother Jones: Why did you join Teach for America?

Christina Torres: I chose it partially because when they recruited me, they touched on some aspects of race and access to education that had affected my own family. My family had worked really hard to ensure my brother and I had received a great public education. Many other schools that kids like me went to didn’t have every AP class offered, free SAT prep, or the hundreds of little privileges I received. This lack of quality and parity was heartbreaking. Teach for America also made it easier to get into the classroom.

MJ: Why did you choose a charter school now?

CT: They offered the job! But also the school has an incredibly strong, positive culture and I work with amazing teachers. I also believed in their charter’s purpose, which is to build a school that acts as a laboratory for innovative curriculum that then gets scaled to the state level.

I have a lot of qualms about the charter movement from what I experienced while I worked in charter schools in Los Angeles. I think they often don’t add anything to the community. However, this charter serves a function I believe in.

MJ: What criticisms—that Teach for America is elitist? Or disrespectful of veteran educators—do you think are deserved?

CT: The criticism that TFA is white, elitist, focused on testing, and short of pedagogical seriousness could also be a applied to a lot of schools and traditional teacher prep programs. Education and teacher training often inherently value white culture. That’s not an excuse, but it seems like the focus on TFA alone minimizes the larger issue that education as a system needs to be inherently rethought. I think TFA is beginning to own its part in that, though, and we need to not just pay lip service to it.

MJ: How do you feel when you hear that Teach for America placed teachers in a city like Seattle in 2010, when there were no teacher shortages or Chicago in 2013, while veteran teachers, often educators of color, were laid off?

CT: Frustrated. It makes me feel angry and sad. Also, it makes it harder to do the work in places with real shortages, such as Hawaii or the Native American reservations.

MJ: What makes you feel like TFA is evolving?

CT: Just the fact that we’re discussing race and privilege—including panels at the summit this year for white folks to begin dismantling their own systems—in such a frank way is completely new. Also, the explicit push for people to teach beyond two years was pretty shocking.

MJ: Is more work needed?

CT: The organization is still deeply entrenched with charters in a way that makes me feel very uncomfortable. The amount of space and funding we give to alumni startups instead of investing that money in already existing structures or entrepreneurs in communities we serve also feels strange. The amount of celebrity we apply to some “higher-up” folks like Wendy Kopp is also something I want to move away from.

MJ: Gary Rubenstein wrote in his blog that most of the summit’s panels were heavily “reformer.” Did you think so?

CT: I think the panels were split between the two sides of TFA: Some were “rah-rah TFA,” but others were all about the work. All the panels I went to were about the empowerment of communities and students of color—culturally responsive pedagogy, student activism, native student education. I felt like I got diverse viewpoints and I was pushed. Characterizing the summit as “mostly” reformer focused seems strong. I think the panels reflected varying interests and beliefs.

MJ: Did the conference address issues or race in a meaningful way?

CT: The TFA Native Alliance Initiative panel focusing on NACA Native American Community Academy charter schools was huge in importance. NACA is an example of what nontraditional schooling should be: a space for communities to create safe, culturally relevant, and innovative education that needs to be protected or cultivated.

But by far, the student activism panel was the strongest part of the summit. The students themselves were given the microphone without any scripts or agendas so they could share their thoughts, beliefs, and stories. Seeing students challenge us as educators was huge to both validate and challenge my own beliefs.

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Is America’s Most Controversial Education Group Changing Its Ways?

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Here’s Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Say Much About Welfare Reform

by PedroSkalski0 Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Clio Chang and Samuel Adler-Bell want to know why Bernie Sanders hasn’t spent more time blasting the Clinton-era welfare reform law and proposing concrete ways to address poverty:

While Sanders frequently repeats and laments the statistic that one in five American children live in poverty, neither he nor Clinton has put forward a specific plan to address it. And neither spends much time talking about food stamps, housing subsidies, or the Earned Income Tax Credit, all essential programs for the poor.

Liberal pundits have criticized Clinton for defending her husband’s welfare legislation—and for parroting the conservative caricature of welfare beneficiaries as “deadbeats”—but so far, it hasn’t created any serious problems for her campaign. But this, perhaps, is to be expected from a more moderate Democrat. The oversight is arguably a more glaring problem for Sanders, who voted against the welfare bill and harshly condemned it in his 1997 book, but hasn’t made it an issue in the primary. In August, he told Bloomberg, with uncharacteristic restraint, “I think that history will suggest that that legislation has not worked terribly well.”

One reason for this restraint may be simple: perhaps Sanders believes that the best approach to poverty is to enact his broad economic revolution. Once that’s done, poverty will start to decrease.

But there’s another possible reason: maybe welfare reform has turned out not to be an especially big deal. After all, by 1996 the old AFDC program accounted for only about $20 billion in spending, a tiny fraction of total welfare spending—and the difference between AFDC spending and the TANF spending that took its place is even more minuscule. The truth is that it’s barely noticeable compared to increases in social welfare spending during the 90s from changes to CHIP, EITC, the minimum wage, and so forth.

On that score, it’s worth taking a look at social welfare spending more broadly. But what’s the best way? We spend just shy of a trillion dollars a year on social welfare and safety net programs, but that number bounces up and down when the economy goes into recession and more people need help. That tells us more about the economic cycle than it does about anti-poverty programs. Instead, we need to look at spending per person in poverty. This gives us a better idea of how policy has responded to poverty over the past few decades. So here it is:

I chose 150 percent of the poverty level as my metric, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter much. This chart looks pretty much the same whether you show total spending, per capita spending, or spending per family below the poverty level. If you remove Medicaid from the mix, the spending increase isn’t as steep but otherwise looks little different.

There are two obvious takeaways from this. First, overall spending on social welfare programs has increased by 3x since 1980. That’s pretty substantial. Second, if the 1996 welfare reform act had any effect on this steady rise in spending, you’d need a chart the size of my house to make it out. Perhaps Bernie Sanders knows this, and understands that in the great scheme of things, welfare reform just isn’t worth fighting over anymore.

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Here’s Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Say Much About Welfare Reform

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Heavy Drinking Is Primarily a Women’s Problem

by DanielISJE Posted on February 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in 2005, South Dakota adopted a program called 24/7 Sobriety. It’s pretty simple: if you’re convicted of drunk driving, you have to take a breath test twice a day while you’re on pretrial release or probation. If you fail, you get tossed in jail for a couple of days.

So how has it worked out? According to a new study in Lancet Psychiatry, pretty well. Previous studies had already demonstrated a 12 percent drop in repeat drunk driving, and the new study shows that 24/7 also contributed to a drop of 4.3 percent in all-cause mortality. That’s a lot of lives saved. Mark Kleiman has more of the details here.

So far, none of this is a big surprise. But another result of the study is more interesting: the decline in mortality was largest among women even though men make up the vast majority of drunk driving cases. The chart on the right shows the numbers. All-cause mortality barely budged for men but was down 8.3 percent among women. Even more startling, the decline in mortality was mostly due to fewer deaths from circulatory problems and external injuries.

But why? The authors make a few suggestions:

A well publicised programme such as 24/7 Sobriety…might promote a general deterrent effect. Another potential mechanism is a reduction in drinking-related problem behaviours among participants, which might reduce mortality among non-participants (eg, domestic violence).

With respect to circulatory deaths among women, one might consider reduced stress due to partner’s cessation of heavy drinking. There might also be spillovers due to changes in the drinking behaviour of participants’ family and friends. A husband’s drinking affects his wife’s drinking during the transition into married life and early in the marriage, and transitions in drinking behaviour can have spousal effects even later in life.

This is, obviously, speculative. Still, it confirms our intuition that heavy drinking affects friends and family as much or more than it does the heavy drinker himself. Heavy drinkers are far more likely to assault their wives and girlfriends; are more likely to trigger drinking in others; and just generally cause lots of stress and anxiety in those around them. When you cut out the heavy drinking, all of those things are reduced significantly. And the biggest beneficiaries are women.

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Heavy Drinking Is Primarily a Women’s Problem

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The Russians Are Doing Surprisingly Well in Syria

by CarlotaShirk Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the interest of keeping myself honest, I should acknowledge that—so far, at least—the Russian incursion in Syria has apparently gone a lot better than I expected:

Under the banner of fighting international terrorism, President Vladimir Putin has reversed the fortunes of forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad….Government forces are now on the offensive, and last week they scored their most significant victory yet….“The operation is considered here to be quite successful,” said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and senior vice president of the Russian Center for Policy Studies in Moscow. It could probably continue for one year or longer, he said, “but it will depend on the success on the ground.”

….“Putin can afford to play geo­political chess in the Middle East because it does not cost much,” said Konstantin von Eggert, an independent political analyst based in Moscow. Entering the conflict in Syria has allowed Putin to combat what he sees as a U.S. policy of regime change, show off his military muscle and reassure allies in the region that Moscow is a loyal partner, von Eggert said.

In the past couple of days, thanks to Russian help, Assad has come ever closer to taking control of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city:

Gains by Assad and his allies in the past month have squeezed overland supply lines to Turkey that may represent the last bulwark against defeat for the rebels in northern Syria.

Assad, who was on the verge of defeat in mid-2015 before Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped in with military support, has wrested back the initiative. His army last week broke a three-year siege of two villages north of Aleppo. The city is almost encircled, apart from a narrow stretch of contested territory.

The Russian air force has acquitted itself better than I expected, and Assad’s forces have taken advantage of Russian air support better than I expected. It’s still early days, of course, and there’s a lot more to Syria than Aleppo. Russia could still find itself drawn into a long, pointless quagmire down the road. But it hasn’t yet.

Over the past decade, Putin has taken on several small-scale military incursions: in Georgia in 2008; in Crimea in 2014; and now in Syria. But small though they may be, they’ve been executed competently and they’ve provided the Russian army with invaluable real-world experience. Apparently that’s paid off.

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The Russians Are Doing Surprisingly Well in Syria

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The One Line in New Hampshire That Donald Trump Won’t Cross

by Volodyslav7uk Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s hard to get too lost on your way to Pittsburg, New Hampshire (pop. 869). You just drive north for a while. And then you keep driving north for a while longer. Pittsburg is New Hampshire’s largest town by land area, covering nearly 300 square miles of North Country mountains and lakes and spanning the entire length of the state’s international border with Canada. It’s also one of the only corners of the nation’s first primary state where candidates never go.

In a year in which Republican candidates have made the Rio Grande a mandatory stop on the presidential campaign trail, trekking to McAllen, Texas, to stare grimly into the Mexican desert, the far vaster northern border—the one terrorists have actually tried to come across—is a much different story. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of town halls and meet-and-greets in the 2016 election cycle, only one happened in Pittsburg. And it was held by Lindsey Graham.

(It’s not just candidates who have a tendency to overlook Pittsburg; in the 1830s, it was excised from the United States by a vaguely written treaty, and it hummed along for three years as the independent republic of Indian Stream before the boundary was clarified.)

“People certainly can sneak through here, there’s no doubt about it,” said Laurie Urekew, braving the snow flurries on Saturday afternoon outside Young’s general store, an all-purpose grocery and gas station that features a punching bag of President Barack Obama by the register. “But it’s very vast here, so chances are someone from the southern area wouldn’t survive too much.”

Tim Murphy / Mother Jones

Urekew is a Republican (“the only good Democrat is a dead one,” she joked), who was torn between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, provided the latter is ruled eligible. “I like Trump because we need somebody like him—he’s strong and yet he’s not afraid to be politically incorrect,” she said. But she trusts Cruz more than Trump to shut down the border—the southern one.

Although Trump is popular in the North Country, his warnings about a Canadian senator usurping the American government has hit with a thud—it’s just not that big of an issue. Canadian flags fly with American ones outside some houses, road signs are in French and English, and there’s a Quebecois radio station. The compelling local issue up north is not the border; it’s the proposed Northern Pass transmission line, which would cut through the North Country to bring hydroelectric power from Canada to the Northeast, but would require the use of eminent domain to acquire land for the project. For that reason, it’s deeply unpopular in northern New Hampshire. (The slogan that Northern Pass opponents have come up with is “Live Free or Fry,” which you have to admit, is pretty good.) Trump was asked about the Northern Pass at Saturday’s debate and gave it his seal of approval.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was widely mocked after briefly entertaining the idea of building a fence on the Canadian border last summer; he dropped out soon after. To the extent that Canada has played a determinative role in the New Hampshire primary, the concern has been what’s leaving the United States, not what’s coming in. Opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the subsequent loss of lumber jobs to Canada, helped propel Republican Pat Buchanan to victory in 1996. (Some Buchanan supporters did believe Russian tanks would invade the United States by way of Canada.)

When I asked Cal DelaHaye, who was working on a piece of funnel cake at Grampy’s diner in Pittsburg, if he thought more candidates should make the trek up north, he was emphatic. “No,” he said. “I’d tell them they’re wasting their time.”

There was one group of New Hampshire Republicans that was particularly concerned about the Canadian border threat. In 2006 and 2007, the New Hampshire branch of the Minutemen Civil Defense League made a few weekend trips to West Derby, Vermont, and Pittsburg, to draw attention to the great northern threat.

“One time we saw a guy who actually parked his car in the New Hampshire side and then backpacked, and it looked like he was hiking the Long Trail, and he headed north toward Canada, and we looked at his car later and it turned out he was from Canada,” said Ron Oplinus of Exeter, New Hampshire, who lead the chapter before it disbanded a few years back. “So we don’t know exactly what was going on but we didn’t see him again.”

Other than that, he conceded, “there wasn’t much” to see.

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The One Line in New Hampshire That Donald Trump Won’t Cross

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Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

by Matthia76J Posted on February 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting look today at the costs and benefits of immigration across the Southern border. After Arizona cracked down on illegal immigration in 2007, their population of undocumented workers dropped by a whopping 40 percent—and it’s stayed down since then:

Arizona is a test case of what happens to an economy when such migrants leave, and it illustrates the economic tensions fueling the immigration debate.

Economists of opposing political views agree the state’s economy took a hit when large numbers of illegal immigrants left for Mexico and other border states, following a broad crackdown. But they also say the reduced competition for low-skilled jobs was a boon for some native-born construction and agricultural workers who got jobs or raises, and that the departures also saved the state money on education and health care. Whether those gains are worth the economic pain is the crux of the debate.

You should read the whole thing if you want all the details, including the fact that wages increased about 15 percent for a small number of construction workers and farmworkers—though Arizona’s unemployment rate more generally has been no better than its neighbors’. Beyond that, though, the Journal provides only a graphic summary that doesn’t really summarize much. So I’ve helpfully annotated it for you. It sure looks to me like Arizona has a very long way to go before the benefits of reducing illegal immigration will come anywhere close to the costs.

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Arizona Is Paying a High Price for Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

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Someone Is Trying to Freak Out New Hampshire’s Undecided Voters

by JeannetteDme Posted on February 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Some voters in New Hampshire opened their mailboxes today to find an envelope stamped in red with “important taxpayer information enclosed.” Inside was a letter featuring an official-looking seal that listed not only the recipients’ voting records, but those of their neighbors.

“WHAT IF YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR NEIGHBORS, AND YOUR COMMUNITY KNEW WHETHER YOU VOTED?” the mailer asked. “We’re sending this mailing to you, some of your friends, neighbors, colleagues at work and community members to make them aware of who does and does not vote.”

A mailer circulated to New Hampshire voters today by a mysterious group

The mailer listed the recipient’s name, his or her record of voting in the last few elections, and the names, addresses, and voting records of nine neighbors. Mother Jones was shown two copies of the mailer, one sent to a registered independent voter in Manchester and the other to a registered Democrat; complaints about this mailer began popping up on the internet this afternoon.

The mailer is very similar to one circulated by Ted Cruz’s campaign to undecided Iowa voters just days before the caucuses. Cruz’s controversial mailer warned of “voting violations” and listed what it said was the voting records of the recipient and his or her neighbors, although the voting data appeared to be incorrect if not made up entirely. (At least one of the New Hampshire mailers featured false voting-record data, according to the recipient.)

Unlike the Iowa mailer, which prominently listed the Cruz campaign as its source, there is no indication who sent the New Hampshire letter. In small print at the bottom of the letter a disclaimer notes that it is “Paid for by Public Policy Matters,” a group that has no obvious web presence. If the New Hampshire mailers are not from Cruz, it’s possible that someone wants to remind New Hampshire’s coveted independent voters of Cruz’s Iowa stunt.

Update: Ted Cruz’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, told Mother Jones that the Cruz campaign did not send the mailers. “All of our mail has a Paid for by Cruz for President disclaimer. Not ours,” Tyler emailed.

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Someone Is Trying to Freak Out New Hampshire’s Undecided Voters

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Maybe Twitter Isn’t Planning to Ruin Your Life After All

by JeanaButcher Posted on February 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Twitter, the big outrage over the past few days has been the news that the corporate suits are planning to change the way your Twitter feed works. Instead of simply listing every tweet from your followers in real time, they’ll be rolling out an algorithm that reorders tweets “based on what Twitter’s algorithm thinks people most want to see.” This is something Facebook has been doing for years.

Power users are apoplectic, despite the fact that it’s not clear what’s really going on. A developer at Twitter hit back with this: “Seriously people. We aren’t idiots. Quit speculating about how we’re going to ‘ruin Twitter.'” Nor is it clear when this is really going to roll out. And the rumors suggest that it will be an opt-in feature anyway. Chronological timelines will still be around for everyone who wants them.

In any case, I’d suggest everyone give this a chance. Computer users, ironically, are notoriously change averse, which might be blinding a lot of us to the fact that chronological timelines aren’t exactly the greatest invention since the yellow first down line. Maybe we really do need something better. More generally, here are a few arguments in favor of waiting to see how this all plays out:

I’m a semi-power user. I don’t write a lot on Twitter,1 but I read it a lot. Still, I have a job and a life, and I don’t check it obsessively. And even though I follow a mere 200 people, all it takes is 15 minutes to make it nearly impossible to catch up with what’s going on. Being on the West Coast makes this an especial problem in the morning. A smart robot that helped solve this problem could be pretty handy, even for those of us who are experts and generally prefer a real-time feed.
One of my most common frustrations is coming back to the computer after a break and seeing lots of cryptic references to some new outrage or other. What I’d really like is a “WTF is this all about?” button. An algorithmic feed could be a useful version of this.
As plenty of people have noted, Twitter is a sexist, racist, misogynistic cesspool. There are things Twitter could do about this, but I suspect they’re limited as long as we rely on an unfiltered chronological timeline. Once an algorithm is introduced, it might well be possible to personalize your timeline in ways that clean up Twitter immensely. (Or that allow Twitter to clean it up centrally—though this obviously needs to be done with a lot of care.)
One of the most persuasive complaints about the algorithm is that it’s likely to favor the interests of advertisers more than users. Maybe so. Unfortunately, Twitter famously doesn’t seem able to find a profitable business model. But if we like Twitter, the first order of business is for it to stay in existence—and that means it needs to make money. This is almost certain to be annoying no matter how Twitter manages to do it. A good algorithm might actually be the least annoying way of accomplishing this.
Needless to say, all of this depends on how good the algorithm is. It better be pretty good, and it better improve over time.

So….stay cool, everyone. Maybe this will be an epic, New Coke style disaster that will end up as a case study in business texts for years. It wouldn’t be the first time. Then again, maybe the algorithm will be subtle, useful, and optional. I’ll be curious to try it out, myself.

1Arguments on Twitter are possibly the stupidest waste of time ever invented. Everything that’s bad about arguments in the first place is magnified tenfold by the 140-character limit. It’s hard to imagine that anyone other than a psychopath has ever emerged from a Twitter war thinking “That was great! I really learned something today.”

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Maybe Twitter Isn’t Planning to Ruin Your Life After All

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Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

by FredaCulver Posted on February 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m feeling a little bored, and that means all of you have to listen to me regaling you with a bunch of random political tweets from my timeline. This is, truly, the best way of getting a real feel for the campaign trail from afar. First up is Donald Trump, who canceled an event today because airports were closed in New Hampshire:

Apparently so. CNN reports that Trump’s operator at LaGuardia was open for business, and the operator in Manchester says it is “always open for business, 24 hours a day.” And even if Trump did have airport trouble, it was only because he insists on going home to New York every night. Apparently the man of the people just can’t stand the thought of spending a few nights at a local Hilton.

This whole thing cracks me up because of Trump’s insistence that he’s a “high energy” guy. But he can’t handle a real campaign, the kind where you spend weeks at a time on the road doing four or five events a day. He flies in for a speech every few days and thinks he’s showing real fortitude. He’d probably drop from exhaustion if he followed the same schedule as Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush.

Next up is Marco Rubio:

This is what makes it hard for me to figure out Rubio’s appeal. To me he seems like a robot: he’s memorized a whole bunch of virtual index cards, and whenever you ask a question he performs a database search and recites whatever comes up. The index cards aren’t bad, mind you, and I suppose they allow him to emulate a dumb person’s notion what a smart person sounds like. This is despite the fact that he normally talks with the same kind of hurried clip employed by nervous eighth graders reading off actual index cards.

Of course, this is just a specific example of a more general problem. Every four years, it looks to me like none of the Republican candidates can win. They all seem to have too many obvious problems. But of course someone has to win. So sure, Rubio reminds me of an over-ambitious teacher’s pet running for student council president, but compared to Trump or Carson or Cruz or Fiorina or Christie—well, I guess I can see how he might look good.

And now for some old-school Hillary Clinton hate:

Well, I’ll be happy to credit the Intercept, but I can hardly say it reflects well on them. This is yet another example of hCDS—Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome.1 I mean, has any candidate for any office ever been asked for transcripts of their paid speeches? This is Calvinball squared. Besides we all know the real reason Hillary doesn’t want to release the transcripts: she gave the same canned speech to everyone and happily pocketed an easy $200 grand for each one. Hell, who wouldn’t do that? Plus there’s the obvious fact that the hCDS crowd would trawl through every word and find at least one thing they could take out of context and make into a three-day outrage. Hillary would have to be nuts to give in to this.

Who’s next? How about Ted Cruz?

Cruz really pissed off Ben Carson in Iowa, just like he seems to piss off nearly everyone who actually gets a whiff of him up close. This is bad for Cruz because he’s trying to appeal to evangelical voters. Unfortunately, Carson has apparently decided that as long as he’s going to lose, he might as well mount a kamikaze attack against Cruz on the way down. And evangelicals listen to Carson. If he says Cruz bears false witness, then he bears false witness.

Finally, some good news for Bernie Sanders:

As it turns out, the Quinnipiac poll is probably bogus. Sam Wang points out that the median post-Iowa bounce was +6 percent in New Hampshire and +4 nationally—in Hillary’s favor. So everyone should take a deep breath.

Still, the big Bernie bounce is what people were talking about today, and it will contribute to an irresistible media narrative. And let’s face it: Hillary Clinton has never been a natural politician. Most Democrats like her, but they don’t love her, and this makes Sanders dangerous. What’s more, since Clinton already has a record for blowing a seemingly insurmountable lead to a charismatic opponent, he’s doubly dangerous. If Democrats convince themselves that they don’t have to vote for Clinton, they just might not. She has lots of baggage, after all.

Is this fair? No. It’s politics. But Clinton still has more money, more endorsements, more superdelegates, more state operations, and—let’s be fair here—a pretty long track record as a sincerely liberal Democrat who works hard to implement good policies. Sanders may damage her, but she’s almost certain to still win.

And that’s that. Isn’t Twitter great? It’s practically like being there. I can almost feel my shoes crunching on the snow drifts.

1This is a good example of a retronym. At first, we just had CDS. But then Hillary ran for president, so we had to make up a new term for insane Bill hatred: bCDS. And that, of course, means we also need hCDS. It’s like brick-and-mortar store or manual transmission.

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Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

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The Bernie vs. Hillary Fight Is Kind of Ridiculous

by BellaMaughan6 Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow supports Hillary Clinton: “I think Bernie’s terrific as an advocate. There’s a difference between a strong community advocate and being someone who can get things done.” Martin Longman says this is an example of how nasty things are getting: “Breaking out the Sarah Palin talking points isn’t smart. Talk about how people view socialism all you want, but don’t dismiss community organizers or advocates. This isn’t a Republican campaign.”

I had to laugh at that. Nasty? I’d rate it about a 1 on the Atwater Scale. Toughen up, folks.

And speaking of this, it sure is hard to take seriously the gripes going back and forth between the Hillary and Bernie camps. Is it really the case that we can’t even agree on the following two points?

Sanders is more progressive than Clinton.
Clinton is more electable than Sanders.

I mean, come on. They’re both lefties, but Sanders is further left. The opposing arguments from the Clinton camp are laughable. Clinton is more progressive because she can get more done? Sorry. That’s ridiculous. She and Bill Clinton have always been moderate liberals, both politically and temperamentally. We have over two decades of evidence for this.

As for electability, I admire Sanders’ argument that he can drive a bigger turnout, which is good for Democrats. But it’s special pleading. The guy cops to being a socialist. He’s the most liberal member of the Senate by quite a margin (Elizabeth Warren is the only senator who’s close). He’s already promised to raise middle-class taxes. He can’t be bothered to even pretend that he cares about national security issues, which are likely to play a big role in this year’s election. He wants to spend vast amounts of money on social programs. It’s certainly true that some of this stuff might appeal to people like me, but it’s equally true that there just aren’t a lot of voters like me. Liberals have been gaining ground over the past few years, but even now only 24 percent of Americans describe themselves that way. Republicans would tear Sanders to shreds with hardly an effort, and there’s no reason to think he’d be especially skilled at fending off their attacks.

I like both Sanders and Clinton. But let’s stop kidding ourselves about what they are and aren’t. Republicans won’t be be swayed by these fantasies, and neither will voters. We might as well all accept it.

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The Bernie vs. Hillary Fight Is Kind of Ridiculous

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