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  • Thoughts on Trump’s appeal

    From some facebook musings of mine:

    [Update: I’d also look at this by Scott Winship, which goes against my main theme, and is quite convincing.]

    You just hear the racism and xenophobia, but Trump’s main themes are actually about trade and jobs.

    Blue-collar white voters feel abandoned by both major political parties… because they have been abandoned. Shouldn’t working-class white men have the right to be heard and even say stupid things as much as, say, the Black Panther Party?

    This isn’t in defense of Trump. God, no. But don’t we have some responsibility to listen to and even have empathy for a large segment of fellow Americans? Instead, we mock and discount their experiences as false and unworthy.

    Not to discount the ugliness and horribleness of this all, but this isn’t just a racist backlash (though that’s certain a part of it); for the average Trump supporter it’s a “where did our jobs go?” backlash. They’ve been abandoned and mocked by mainstream America. There is no voice speaking for the blue-collar former union man or woman who is anything but “entitled.” I think we ignore that at our own peril.

    Don’t get me wrong. Trump is scary. He is a demagogue preaching dangerous racist proto-fascist bullshit. But asking why his supporters aren’t more vocal in opposition to hate is akin to those on the right saying, “Why don’t all Muslims denounce terrorism?” A) Many do, B) Why should they?

    [There’s a difference, of course, in that Muslims aren’t going to terrorist rallies while Trump is actively encouraging the hate. So it’s hardly a perfect comparison.]

    But my point is less about Trump, whom I loathe, then about tens of millions of blue-collar American who have been sold an economic woof ticket by both political parties for the past 35 years. They thought the system was on the level (if not biased in their favor). Well, it’s not.

    They played by the rules, only to find the game changed.

    And for decades nobody, certainly not either political party, listened or cared. They wanted somebody to follow. Trump stepped into that void. (It could have been Biden, or maybe Edwards, but it wasn’t.)

    And if we don’t have empathy for the Trump supporters who aren’t racist, what are we going to do? Deport them?

    …

    Oh, I do think Trump supporters are being sold a bill of goods once again. But Trump is offering, I think, Protectionism. That is the appeal. Protectionism is now a four-letter word, but should it be? Trump is the first major political candidate (it pains me to write that) to speak against free trade since Ross Perot and the “great sucking sound.” That’s the key.

    So no, it’s not primarily about race. (Though I think it is more about race than Trump supporters are willing to admit.)

    Fuck fair trade and NAFTA. Fuck non-union wages in Mexico. I mean, thousands of Americans did actually lose their union jobs because of NAFTA. Was it good for America? I don’t know. It probably was good for me. But it sure as hell wasn’t good for Maytag factory workers in Illinois!

    So yeah, what you and I see as xenophobia? To an unemployed American worker, it’s his livelihood. His experience has been dismissed by both parties and most economists as irrelevant. (And economists do not have a great track record, it is worth mentioning.)

    The right wants to bust unions and Obama dismissed tens of millions of Americans as “clinging to their guns and religion.” That did great harm.

    Republicans want to reduce wages. Democrats want to help illegal immigrants. Liberals (myself included) want to help criminals reintegrate into society. And the racism that you and I hate? It barely registers if you love Trump and don’t watch MSNBC or listen to NPR. The racism is there, but it’s media spin. Trump hammers home this message: jobs jobs jobs. We’re ignoring that.

    The non-criminal white guy in the midwest who played by the rules and still lost his union factory job to NAFTA?! He’s not an immigrant; he’s not a minority; he’s not transgendered; he’s not a criminal. Who the hell speaks for him? Nobody but Donald effing Trump.

  • Dukakis is one smart Greek

    It’s too bad this man wasn’t president. Oh, the economic and foreign policy horrors that could have been avoided. But I don’t say that just because he’s Greek. (Though that helps.) And I don’t say that just because he was kind enough to write the introduction to my Greek Americans book. (Though that was very nice of him.)

    Here’s what Dukakis has to say about current political issues. In Slate.

    I like his take down of Scalia’s so-called “originalism,” which masked little more than a hard-core conservative ideology:

    What would I be doing? I’d be pointing out that if you are a constitutionalist, or an originalist, whatever those terms mean—because they really mean nothing. You know, Nino [Scalia] was a classmate of mine at law school. He was no more an originalist than the man on the moon.

    What was originalist about Bush v. Gore? What was originalist about the Second Amendment decision? What was originalist about Citizens United for God’s sake, Isaac? We have been regulating campaign contributions since the late 19th century. Where in the Constitution does it say that money is speech? Originalism? Are you kidding me? But in any event, if you believe that, then the president has a solemn responsibility to make a nomination and the Senate has a solemn responsibility to consider it seriously, right?

    …

    A bright guy — yeah. But he was to the right of Marie Antoinette for Christ’s sake. There was no consistency in his so-called philosophy. Money is corporate speech. This is all preposterous.

    His take on foreign policy is also excellent and worth reading.

  • It’s been a bad week for cops

    Eight cops have been shot and killed this month. And February, 2016, ain’t even half over. Already, on my social media stream, I see my cop friends blaming Obama.

    Well, you must remember December, 2003 when seven cops were shot and killed? Republican George W Bush was president. August of that year? Nine cops were shot and killed. April? Ten cops shot and killed.

    Or maybe it was better when Reagan was president and this country “was great”? In July, 1982, eight cops were shot and killed. August: ten. September: eleven. October: eight.

    Ronald Reagan? 37 cops shot and killed in four months!

    Under the Obama administration, you have to go back to May of last year to get 37 cops shot and killed. (That’s nine months, for those lacking in certain skills.)

    Do I think the president is to be blamed for dead cops? No. And that’s my point. But maybe you just hate Obama so much that you don’t remember any of that. That’s fine. Honestly, I had to look up those old figures. But you conservative Obama-hating motherf*ckers said you’d “never forget.” But you have.

    If you want to judge presidents by the number of cops shot and killed, Obama has been the most pro-cop president ever. And if your conservative ideology is more important to you than dead cops? Well, then, fuck you.

  • There is absolutely NO NEED TO PANIC!

    There is absolutely NO NEED TO PANIC!

    The latest Brennan Center report projects the 30 largest cities will see a 14.6 percent increase in homicide this year.

    You know the last time the nation saw a 15 percent annual increase in the homicide rate?

    Never.

    Remain Calm. All is well.

    But don’t worry, they say in their best “you are getting sleepy” voice. There’s no reason to concerned:

    However, in absolute terms, murder rates are so low that a small numerical increase leads to a large percentage change. Even with the 2015 increase, murder rates are roughly the same as they were in 2012 — in fact, they are slightly lower. Since murder rates vary widely from year to year, one year’s increase is not evidence of a coming wave of violent crime.

    A handful of cities have seen sharp rises in murder rates. Just two cities, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., account for almost 50 percent of the national increase in murders.

    These serious increases seem to be localized, rather than part of a national pandemic, suggesting community conditions are a major factor. The preliminary report examined five cities with particularly high murder rates… and found these cities also had significantly lower incomes, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment, and falling populations than the national average.

    Hmmmm, Statistical aberration are always a possibility and poverty and falling population makes me drowzzzzzzzzzzzy.

    But when I snap out of it, I’m still concerned. Why do so many seem to be in denial about such a large increase in murder.

    Can’t we be politically correct and also ask what the heck is going on? When FBI director Comey said he was concerned, he received loud chiding from the political left and even a presidential rebuke.

    If you think it doesn’t matter, please let me know exactly what conditions need to be met, specifically how many more people have to die, before we are allowed to be concerned and move on from silly semantic debates. Shouldn’t we better focus our efforts and, if you’re so inclined, even your outrage?

    No, don’t panic. But frankly, I think it’s OK to be a little concerned.

    I have an idea! Instead of denying a dangerous increase in lethal crime, why don’t we put on our thinking caps and ask what has changed this year with regards to policing and violent crime. But before you answer take a deep breath and then come back after a good night’s sleep!

    sources include:

    http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/homrate1.htm

    http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-13

    (Correction: Originally I missed the the fact the Brennan Report was only talking about the rate in the 30 largest cities. This post has been changed to include that rather important detail.)

    [Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

    The latest Brennan Center report projects the 30 largest cities will see a 14.6 percent increase in homicide this year.You know the last time the nation saw a 15 percent annual increase in the homicide rate?

    Never.

    Remain Calm. All is well.

    But don’t worry, they say in their best “you are getting sleepy” voice. There’s no reason to concerned:

    However, in absolute terms, murder rates are so low that a small numerical increase leads to a large percentage change. Even with the 2015 increase, murder rates are roughly the same as they were in 2012 — in fact, they are slightly lower. Since murder rates vary widely from year to year, one year’s increase is not evidence of a coming wave of violent crime.

    A handful of cities have seen sharp rises in murder rates. Just two cities, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., account for almost 50 percent of the national increase in murders.

    These serious increases seem to be localized, rather than part of a national pandemic, suggesting community conditions are a major factor. The preliminary report examined five cities with particularly high murder rates… and found these cities also had significantly lower incomes, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment, and falling populations than the national average.

    Hmmmm, Statistical aberration are always a possibility and poverty and falling population makes me drowzzzzzzzzzzzy.

    But when I snap out of it, I’m still concerned. Why do so many seem to be in denial about such a large increase in murder.

    Can’t we be politically correct and also ask what the heck is going on? When FBI director Comey said he was concerned, he received loud chiding from the political left and even a presidential rebuke.

    If you think it doesn’t matter, please let me know exactly what conditions need to be met, specifically how many more people have to die, before we are allowed to be concerned and move on from silly semantic debates. Shouldn’t we better focus our efforts and, if you’re so inclined, even your outrage?

    No, don’t panic. But frankly, I think it’s OK to be a little concerned.

    I have an idea! Instead of denying a dangerous increase in lethal crime, why don’t we put on our thinking caps and ask what has changed this year with regards to policing and violent crime. But before you answer take a deep breath and then come back after a good night’s sleep!

    sources include:

    http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/homrate1.htm

    http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

    https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/table-13

    (Correction: Originally I missed the the fact the Brennan Report was only talking about the rate in the 30 largest cities. This post has been changed to include that rather important detail.)

    [Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

  • Does rhetoric incite violence?

    Why don’t anti-abortion politicians who say ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬-rhetoric endangers cops take responsibility for Officer Swasey’s murder at Planned Parenthood?

    If anti-abortion rhetoric doesn’t have any relation to the murder of Officer Swasey and innocent women at Planned Parenthood, how could anti-cop rhetoric have any relation to people attacking cops? On the flip side, if anti-abortion rhetoric does incite violence against abortion clinics, why wouldn’t the same be true for anti-cop rhetoric and subsequent attacks on cops?

    As to the question of rhetoric inciting violence, shouldn’t we at least be consistent? It’s frustrating when ideology and making political points seem more important than the murder of police officers and other innocent people.

    Update: When I posted this idea on Twitter, I got one response saying that we shouldn’t “jump to conclusions” that the attack on Planned Parenthood has anything to do with anti-abortion rhetoric. Of course not.

    On the other side, somebody from the Left informed me that #BlackLivesMatter isn’t anti-cop, “it is [just] against the abuse of law enforcement in taking of black lives.” Besides, “violence in #BLM rhetoric is self-defense.” Of course….Just like pro-life people are really only against the abuse fetuses take when aborted.

    So can rhetoric lead to violence? Sure, sometimes. But if so, do we just accept it as an unfortunately side-effect of free speech in a gun-loving society? I would say yes, at least up to a point. But regardless, we shouldn’t say that only people on the other ideological side can be inspired into violent action by idiotic rhetoric.

  • What the War on Drugs was really about: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black”

    Dan Baumwrites about what the Drug War was really about:

    In 1993, I was researching my first book, Smoke and Mirrors, which is the tale, starting in the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign, of how drugs were turned into a political weapon. I tracked down as many people as I could who had been involved in drug policy in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and brand-new Clinton administrations. Among the first I found was John Ehrlichman, who was at the time doing minority recruitment for an engineering firm in Atlanta. He looked nothing then like he had when he’d been a principal Watergate villain in the early 1970s and an evil god in the bad-guy pantheon of my youth. By 1993, he was fat, and wore an Old Testament beard that extended far below the knot of his necktie. He impatiently waved away my earnest, wonky questions about drug policy.

    “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the world-weary air of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

  • Right-Wing Lies (XI): Donald Trump says…

    Right-Wing Lies (XI): Donald Trump says…

    There’s something that’s starting to scare me about Trump and his supporters. I mean, is it really inconceivable that he will win the Republican nomination for president?

    Here’s a doozy of a Tweet posted by Donald Trump:

    Leaving aside the racist imagery, Trump’s numbers aren’t even close to being true.

    Here are the (approximate, but true) numbers (which, like Trump, omits hispanics):

    Blacks killed by whites: 11%

    Blacks killed by police: 4%

    Whites killed by police: 10%

    Whites killed by whites: 84%

    Whites killed by blacks: 15%

    Blacks killed by blacks: 89%

    Can people really believe that 4 in 5 murdered whites are killed by blacks? Or is just something the fearful Right wants to believe? Either way, such a belief, with no basis in truth, is somewhat between ignorant and terrifying. (Also, there is no “Crime Statistics Bureau — San Fransisco”)

    When the leading Republican candidate for President has behavior entirely consistent with fascist thuggery, I think he needs to be called out. Whether it’s Trump’s thinking that it might be good for his white mob to rough up a minority protester, his openness to the concept of registering all Muslims in America, him calling Mexicans rapists, his lies about Arabs in Jersey City cheering the fall of the World Trade Center, or his overall tone of lies and fear mongering.

    I don’t know if trump is a fascist. I think he’s more just an attention whore than an ideologue. But maybe he really does believe what he’s saying. Certainly his followers love it. America has a long and ugly history of Nativism. And while not all Nativists are fascists, there is a bunch of overlap.

    Source: (an actual real one) UCR, 2010-2013. Yearly police-involved shootings extrapolated from the Washington Post. Hispanics in the Post are reclassified as 86 percent white and 12 percent black. This is to be consistent with the UCR, which does not count Hispanic as a race.

    Update #1.

    Update #2:

  • Bar the doors! Board the windows!

    Bar the doors! Board the windows!

    Halloween is coming! 6,000 inmates are about to be released from prison. Most got about 2 years cut from a 10 year drug sentence.

    Think of it: 6,000 roving marauders. Pirates! Barbarians!! Thugs!!! They’ll be Shanghaiing our youth, raping our maidens, and pillaging our homes! At least that’s what I’m learning from some on the Right. (See me on Bill O’Reilly.)

    Don’t believe the hype.

    6,000 is less than the number released from prison every goddamned week in the US.

    You know what will happen when, during one week, that number of released prisoners goes from 12,000 to 18,000?

    Absolutely nothing.

    Update: I just heard on public radio that close to 2,000 of those 6,000 are going to be immediately deported to Mexico (Nothing like investing half a billion dollars on incarcerating people before kicking them out of the country). So the actually weekly increase of people getting out of prison will go from about 12,000 to 14,000.

    Only semi-related: Here’s a nice pie chart from PPI. It’s rare to see things broken down by why you’re there, and include immigrants and juveniles:

  • Liberals eating themselves

    In the Comey story, in which a seemingly liberal FBI director discusses crime, police, race, and history and get pilloried by the left, the New York Times takes the cake. In some Bizarro World I’m not part of, The Grey Lady deemed Comey’s comments “incendiary” and playing “into the right-wing view that holding the police to constitutional standards endangers the public. … His formulation implies that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive.”

    No, he doesn’t say that or even imply it. Where do they get this from?! It seems like they first wrote an unfair headline about Comey, and then exploded in outrage over their own bad reporting. Classy.

    From a liberal perspective, Comey shows an amazing understanding of the problem. Given what he is actually saying, Comey will have a much greater problem with maintaining credibility with the conservative right, ie: most cops.

    Comey said so much. I know from personal experience that the Times might call someone, say, a “denier of reality” not because of anything actually said but because of a 2nd-hand out-of-context misquote they were pointed to in a conservative rag. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that because Comey said one thing — something any cop will tell you — because Comey veered ever so slightly from the Party Line by suggesting the possibility that viral videos might be [gasp] having some impact on policing, the Times concludes that Comey, “hasn’t begun to grasp the nature of the problem.” Did they even listen to what he said? I kind of doubt it.

  • Three Cheers for FBI Director Comey

    It’s kind of funny to watch the Left completely freak out at the mere suggestion from Comey that viral videos might have an impact on police on crime. See thisand this and this:

    And this:

    Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.

    Here’s a speech he gaveon Oct 15. It’s worth listening to (it’s just 6 minutes).

    This is a thoughtful and intelligent guy. And most of his comments are far too liberal for the police world. I mean, check out what he said yesterday: Cops can learn from #blacklivesmatter. Shocking, I tell you. Shocking.

    More people are being killed. And Comey is thinking. And he’s saying we need more and better data. And yeah, maybe viral videos and political fall-out have an effect on policing. Uh, of course they have an effect on policing. So let’s talk.

    You can read the text of his more recent speech here.

    As no great person ever said, “The clairvoyance of injustice is dogmatic in its complexity.” (Thanks to @AyeRishPirate)