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Obama Ruined the Tea Party for All of Us

by RomeoPeakahbxr Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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A friend draws my attention today to a piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry about—of course—the wild popularity of Donald Trump among tea partiers. Lowry waxes nostalgic for the early tea party days of 2010, when being a “constitutional conservative” was all the rage, and wonders where it all went:

Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no trade-offs or limits….He would deport the American-born children of illegal immigrants. He has mused about shutting down mosques and creating a database of Muslims. He praised FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.

You can be forgiven for thinking that in Trump’s world, constitutional niceties—indeed any constraints whatsoever—are for losers….For some on the right, clearly, the Constitution was an instrument rather than a principle. It was a means to stop Obama, and has been found lacking.

My friend snickers at Lowry’s use of some, which does a whole lot of heavy lifting here. Technically, though, 95 percent is still some, so this is accurate. But a wee bit misleading, no? Anyway, this leads Lowry into an argument that, really, Trump is just Obama 2.0:

Trump is a reaction to Obama’s weakness but also to his exaggerated view of executive power….Whereas Obama has a cool contempt for his political opponents and for limits on his power, Trump has a burning contempt for them. The affect is different; the attitude is the same.

….A hallmark of Obama’s governance has been to say that he lacks the power to act unilaterally on a given issue, and then do it anyway. Progressives have been perfectly willing to bless Obama’s post-constitutional government. Trump’s implicit promise is to respond in kind, and his supporters think it’s about time.

Uh huh. So far, Obama has done OK in the Supreme Court, but no matter. Tea partiers believe Obama goes to sleep each night not by counting sheep, but by counting bonfires of Constitutions. Or, as Lowry admits, they pretend to believe this. In reality, it’s just a handy way to oppose Obama’s liberal policies.

Now, it’s never been clear to me why you need this kind of charade. Why not just oppose Obama’s liberal policies because they’re no good? I suppose it’s mainly a palliative for the rubes, who don’t like to think of themselves as meanspirited folks who dislike paying taxes to help the less fortunate. Instead, they can complain that Obama’s policies are unconstitutional; or that he’s running up dangerous levels of debt; or that he’s turning America into sclerotic old Europe. That sounds a lot nicer.

Anyway, Lowry’s actual goal in this piece is to come up with conservative arguments against Trump. That’s the Lord’s work, even if “Obama 2.0” seems a little unlikely to catch on. What’s more, I seem to recall that he’s a cat person in an office jampacked with dog people. And Christmas is right around the corner. So I’ll call a truce. No more writing about Donald Trump until Christmas is over. We all deserve a break.

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Obama Ruined the Tea Party for All of Us

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How Far Do You Live From Your Mother?

by NoellaCote992 Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to Google Maps, I live 13.64 miles from my mother. This is less than the median of 18 miles for American adults:

The biggest determinants of how far people venture from home are education and income. Those with college and professional degrees are much more likely to live far from their parents than those with a high school education, in part because they have more job opportunities elsewhere, including in big cities.

….Families live closest in the Northeast and the South, and farthest apart on the West Coast and in the Mountain States. Part of the reason is probably cultural — Western families have historically been the least rooted — but a large part is geographical. In denser areas, people live closer together than in rural areas.

Married couples live farther from their parents than unmarried people, and women are slightly more likely to leave their hometowns than men. Blacks are more likely to live near their parents than whites, while Latinos are no more likely to live near their parents, but more likely to live with them, according to data from Mr. Pollak and Janice Compton, an economist at the University of Manitoba.

How far do you live from your mother?

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How Far Do You Live From Your Mother?

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Obamacare Continues to Do Pretty Well

by Archie26Euwfzre Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shorter Charles Gaba: For now, it still looks like Obamacare enrollment this year will end up at around 14.7 million. That’s not bad, especially considering that fewer people are dropping out of employer plans than expected.

For everyone except die-hard conservatives who are driven mad by the thought of poor people getting decent health care, this is a pretty good Christmas present. Enjoy it.

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Obamacare Continues to Do Pretty Well

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

by CarrolHargis Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Our long national nightmare is nearly over:

Happy holidays from the Beatles: As of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 24, the band’s music will finally be available on streaming services worldwide.

…The surviving members of the group, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with Universal Music Group, which controls the band’s recorded music, made no statements other than the fact that the Beatles’ catalog — 13 original albums and four compilations — will now be playable on nine subscription streaming music services.

Maybe I need to try one of these newfangled streaming thingies someday. I’ve heard rumors that music has continued to be produced over the past 30 years, and I suppose I should investigate that.

So: Beatles or Stones? Which are you?

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Soon You Will Be Able To Listen to "Rocky Raccoon" on Spotify

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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2015

by Lucile70Wh Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve wanted to use this headline1 for a long time, and now I have. I guess I could just end this post right there, or maybe ramble on about how Hunter S. Thompson’s 1972 collection of campaign reporting was one of the books that got me interested in politics in the first place. Me and a million others, I suppose.

But no. I actually have a point to make, and I will get around to making it, I promise. First, though, I’m turning over the mic2 to my great-grandblogger3 Martin Longman. He was bemused by blogger Tom Maguire’s casual acceptance that fear is a perfectly reasonable emotion to exploit in a political campaign:

At first, I was offended. Then I realized that we’re both probably correct in our own way, but with limitations.

I’m sure if I challenged him, Maguire would recite countless examples of Democratic politicians exploiting the fears of the electorate. These would be fears about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, or fears about NSA surveillance, or fears about grandma losing her Medicare or Social Security….I think this is different in kind, though, than using fear itself as a political tool….What’s really bad, in my opinion, is to deliberately increase people’s sense of insecurity not primarily so that they will demand policies to keep them safe but to make them more inclined to vote for you and your political party. Making people afraid for political gain is cynical and almost cruel.

As Longman suggests, this is a mighty thin line to draw, and I’m not sure it’s the right line anyway. Here’s the thing that liberals tend not to want to accept: different people evaluate threats in far different ways. This is not right or wrong. It’s just human nature.

I tend to be almost absurdly non-fearful, for example. This is not because I’m brave in the usual sense: I run from fights at the first opportunity and I have no idea if I’d rescue a drowning child from a watery maelstrom. I’m talking about more abstract fears. Should you be afraid of being mugged? Afraid of terror attacks? Afraid of earthquakes?6 In my case, I never even bother getting out of bed if I feel an earthquake. I just roll over and wait for it to stop.

This is, by almost any measure, stupid. Sure, most earthquakes around here are fairly small. But not all of them. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least hop out of bed and get ready in case my house starts to collapse? Yes it would. I’m putting my life in danger by underplaying the threat.

So who has the more correct view of national security threats, liberals or conservatives? As it happens, liberals tend to feel less threatened than conservatives by danger from others, something that we paid a big political price for when we ignored the huge rise in violent crime in the 60s and 70s. Conservatives tend to respond more strongly to threats from others, something that they paid a political price for in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In the first case, conservatives understood the reality better. In the second case, liberals did.

This is not because conservatives were smarter the first time and we were smarter the second time. It’s because, at a very deep level, we react to threats differently. There’s no purely objective way to decide who’s right and who’s wrong in any particular case, but I think you can reasonably say that sometimes conservatives are closer to right and sometimes liberals are closer to right.

So what’s the right response to terrorist attacks? I can’t even imagine being personally afraid of one. The odds of being targeted by some insane jihadist are astronomical. But a vast number of people feel very, very differently.7 At a gut level, they’re afraid that what happened in Paris and San Bernardino could happen to them—and they want something done about it. Are they right? Or am I right? Who can say?

But that’s why conservatives are exploiting this fear. Conservatives consider terror attacks a serious and alarming threat. Liberals tend not to, which is why our politicians mostly adopt a pretty even tone about them. In both cases, this response is politically useful. Mainly, though, it’s genuinely how they feel. Conservatives really do feel threatened. Liberals really don’t.

Keep this in mind. It’s not a sham. It’s not just cynicism. I happen to think conservatives are wrong about this, and I think their campaign-trail exploitation of terrorist fear has gone far beyond anything even remotely reasonable. But at its core, this is a real disagreement. How safe are we and what should we do to increase our safety? When you cut through the bombast, there’s a very hard, very bright, very deep, and very human core of division here. And there’s no guarantee that you or your tribe has the right take on it.

1Yes, I know I’ve punctuated it differently than the book.

2Even though I’m officially an old person, I am adopting the Washington Post dictum that mike is no longer acceptable shorthand for microphone in modern America. It lives on in the NATO alphabet, though.

3Longman4 is my third successor as blogger at the Washington Monthly.

4Or “Phil’s brother,” as his closest friends call him.5

5That’s just a joke. Martin is Phil Longman’s brother.

6Needless to say, this depends a lot on circumstances. Women in dangerous neighborhoods are quite legitimately more afraid of being mugged than men in the suburbs. People living in Beirut are more afraid of terror attacks than people in Atlanta. People in Tokyo are more afraid of earthquakes than people in London. Still, we can reasonably talk about averages here.

7This is clear both anecdotally and via polling. I know personally plenty of people who are afraid of a terrorist attack. And recent polls are quite clear that a large majority of Americans are concerned about further attacks.

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Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 2015

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

by Aaleyah William Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Iraqi forces are fighting to retake control of Ramadi, a city of half a million about an hour west of Baghdad:

“I think the fall of Ramadi is inevitable,” said Col. Steven H. Warren, the United States military spokesman here. “The end is coming.” But he added: “That said, it’s going to be a tough fight.”

….If Iraqi forces manage to reassert control over Ramadi — the capital and largest city in Iraq’s western Anbar Province — it will be the latest in a series of military setbacks for the Islamic State. President Obama said recently that the militant group had lost 40 percent of the Iraqi territory it had seized in the middle of last year, as the United States and its allies have intensified their aerial bombardment against the group. In October, Iraqi forces and Shiite militias retook control of the northern city of Baiji and its oil refinery, and last month, Kurdish and Yazidi forces expelled the Islamic State out of the northern city of Sinjar.

Progress is slow but steady. The map below, from IHS, shows the territory lost by ISIS over the past year. There’s still a long way to go.

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ISIS Had a Good Year in PR, Not So Good on the Ground

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Quote of the Day: We Are Not Teaching Our Children Enough Vocabulary to Navigate the Modern World

by OCKLarae398127 Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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From a recent study on swearing:

Both formats produced positive correlations between COWAT fluency, animal fluency, and taboo word fluency, supporting the fluency-is-fluency hypothesis. In each study, a set of 10 taboo words accounted for 55–60% of all taboo word data.

What this means is that people who cuss a lot are smarter than the rest of you. So there. Wonkblog’s Ana Swanson, who apparently has access to the full paper, explains further:

In order to use bad words appropriately, people still have to understand nuanced distinctions about language, the paper says. As such, cursing isn’t a sign of a limited vocabulary at all. Past research has shown that when people are really at a loss for words, they tend to say things like “er” or “um,” rather than cursing. Other studies have shown that college students are more likely to use curse words, and that this group tends to have a larger vocabulary than the population in general.

“A voluminous taboo lexicon may better be considered an indicator of healthy verbal abilities rather than a cover for their deficiencies,” the researchers write.

Quite so. And on that score, the study’s findings should give us all pause. Take a look at the chart on the right, which shows the number of words people could dredge up in three different categories. Apparently the average American can come up with only 11 curse words. Eleven! That’s pathetic. I have dreams where I use more curse words than that. Of course, there’s much I don’t know about the methodology of this study. How much time did people have to come up with words? How unique did words have to be? Are fuck and fuckwit separate words, or merely different members of the vast fuck family? It would cost me $35.95 to find out, and you can guess how likely I am to spend my Christmas money on that.

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Quote of the Day: We Are Not Teaching Our Children Enough Vocabulary to Navigate the Modern World

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It’s Time for TV Critics to Become a Little More Critical

by MandyMcLaren9 Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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I hate to pick on TV critic Todd VanDerWerff, but today he really encapsulates a pet peeve of mine:

There’s so much out there! This year, there were more than 400 scripted dramas and comedies just in primetime….So when you see that the list below starts at 35, and then see that I’ve thrown in an additional 25 runners-up, know that I’m choosing only a small fraction of a fraction of the shows I wanted to include. (My initial list of programs to either consider or catch up on ran nearly 175 titles in total)….While the number 10 is largely an arbitrary one, there is some value to conciseness, so I’ve also ranked everything. If you just want to know my top 10, you can scroll down to that point. And if your favorite show isn’t on this list, I probably just didn’t watch it.

I am absolutely drowned in stories these days about the best show on TV. Or the best show nobody watches. Or the best show on cable. Or the best show not on cable. Or the most criminally underrated show. Or the best show ever about prison. Or the best show ever about the military. Or the best show ever about the transgendered. Or the funniest show. Or the most heartbreaking show. Or the funniest show you’ve ever watched about a trangendered Marine Corps officer who ends up in prison.

We don’t live in the golden age of television. We don’t even live in the platinum age of television. Apparently we live in the unobtanium age of television.

Enough. This has become a joke. Theodore Sturgeon said 90 percent of everything is crap. He was being generous. Even so, this means that maybe 2 or 3 percent of everything is truly outstanding. If you think 60 TV shows out of 400 are must watch—and it was hard to narrow it down to that number from 175—you’re just not being critical enough.

I get that TV spent a long time as the bastard stepchild of the critical world, routinely mocked for its boob-tube idiocy. And when genuinely great shows like The Wire and The Sopranos came along, it was something of a revelation. But this doesn’t mean that a decade later upwards of half of all TV shows are brilliant. Critics do their readers no favors when they gush about so much stuff that their recommendations no longer even seem meaningful.

I don’t begrudge anyone their favorites. As much as I’m tired of the endless parade of shows being described as brilliant, I’m equally tired of TV (and music and art and fashion) being used as cultural bludgeons against the less sophisticated. If you like NCIS, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly decent procedural. If you didn’t like Mad Men, that’s fine too. A show that spends seven years focusing on a faux mysterious protagonist and a relentlessly predictable affair of the week just isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You shouldn’t think you have a penetrating intellect because you hate the former and love the latter.

But now I’m just ranting. Feel free to rant back, since I started this. But I will stick to my guns on one thing: There are not dozens or hundreds of great shows on TV, and being a critic is not the same as being a fanboy. If you like virtually everything you watch—and an awful lot of TV critics seem to—you really need to be more critical.

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It’s Time for TV Critics to Become a Little More Critical

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State of the Race: Ben Carson is Doomed

by CharmainDevanny Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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There is truly nothing much to blog about today. So to keep everyone up to date, here are the latest Pollster averages for the GOP primary race. Ben Carson is pretty obviously playing the Cain/Gingrich/Santorum role in this year’s election. Rubio needs to get his act together or else he’ll end up as a mini-Cain/Gingrich/Santorum. And the two most hated men in the race, Trump and Cruz, are doing great. I’m not sure I can tell you what the “Republican establishment” is—a bunch of guys smoking fat cigars while their faithful lobbyists serve them snifters of brandy?—but whoever they are, they must be booking tickets to the Cayman Islands right about now to pick up their stashes of Krugerrands so they can be prepared to flee the country.

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State of the Race: Ben Carson is Doomed

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President Obama Adopts Bold, New Policy Toward Islamic State

by SilviaAshmore44 Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to the New York Times, President Obama said this in an NPR radio interview:

“This is a serious challenge — ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq,” Mr. Obama said, referring to attacks the group organized in Paris and apparently inspired in San Bernardino. “But it is also important for us to keep things in perspective, and this is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

Seriously? He called it ISIS instead of ISIL? Hallelujah! Can someone please confirm this?

UPDATE: The interview is here. Obama really did say ISIS. Once. He said ISIL the other 22 times he referred to them. But it’s a start!

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President Obama Adopts Bold, New Policy Toward Islamic State

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