Month: April 2016

Sunday Funnies

by digby

McFadden NY Times:

Politics and Reality radio

with Joshua Holland

Politics and Reality radio: Moms, Daughters & Feminism; Roy Edroso on Right-Bloggers

This week, we speak with Fairleigh Dickinson University political scientist Krista Jenkins, who used a unique database of data from mothers and daughters attending a women’s college 30 years apart to offer some insight how their gender socialization and views of politics have changed since the heyday of the women’s movement.

Then we’re joined by the great Roy Edroso, an O.G. of the lefty blogosphere who writes the Alicublog and does a weekly column diagnosing the disorders of right-bloggers for The Village Voice. We talk Trump, and other stuff.

Last but not least, we’ll talk to Harold Pollack, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago (and also a mensch), to discuss structural racism in the Chicago PD, and the prospects for reform.

PLAYLIST:
Prince: “Let’s Go Crazy”
Prince: “Cream”
Prince: “Honky-Tonk Woman”
Prince: “Darling Nikki”

As always, you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or Podbean.

Has America lost its resilience?
by Tom Sullivan

One of Pavlov’s dogs, preserved at The Pavlov Museum, Ryazan, Russia.
By Rklawton via Wikimedia Commons

Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

That is how people who study psychological resilience see the difference between people who rise above adversity and those who succumb to it. Maria Konnikova wrote about those studies in a February New Yorker article. Coping skills come naturally to some people, but they can also change over time. “The stressors can become so intense that resilience is overwhelmed,” Konnikova writes. “Most people, in short, have a breaking point.”

The most resilient people, it seems, have an “internal locus of control.” They have a sense that they are “orchestrators of their own fates.” That is indeed how many Americans prefer to portray themselves. (“Masters of their domain,” to appropriate a euphemism from Seinfeld.) Those skills can also be learned, researchers find. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, a pioneer in positive psychology, found that “learned helplessness” can be unlearned using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:

Seligman found that training people to change their explanatory styles from internal to external (“Bad events aren’t my fault”), from global to specific (“This is one narrow thing rather than a massive indication that something is wrong with my life”), and from permanent to impermanent (“I can change the situation, rather than assuming it’s fixed”) made them more psychologically successful and less prone to depression.

One of the psychologists behind the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program attended one of Seligman’s lectures on how people might resist torture and interrogation. Rather than use Seligman’s work to cure learned helplessness, he and his colleague used the research to induce it in prisoners.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, finds that stress response can be a matter of perception. “We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things,” he believes. Regulating emotions can be taught.

Unfortunately, the opposite may also be true. “We can become less resilient, or less likely to be resilient,” Bonanno says. “We can create or exaggerate stressors very easily in our own minds. That’s the danger of the human condition.” Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. In a sense, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow. Focus on it, frame it as a threat, and a potentially traumatic event becomes an enduring problem; you become more inflexible, and more likely to be negatively affected.

All this exposition leads to this observation: This anti-therapeutic approach is the right wing media’s business model. The “Ground Zero mosque,” communists (jihadis) hiding in woodpiles, gender-neutral bathrooms, jackbooted government thugs coming for your guns, ACORN, zombie voters, etc. Has hyping everything as a threat and spending hours a day on radio and television for years on end fulminating over the daily outrage been one, huge, informal experiment in inducing helplessness among the American populous simply to make us more compliant? Or perhaps it is just id talking to id. Whatever. With all the time Americans spend running around with their hair on fire, you’d think we’d all look like Vin Diesel.

Prince onscreen this weekend: A guide

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They know from political interference

by digby

Senator Chuck Grassley:

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said Friday that he believed that the FBI could leak the results of its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server if “political interference” gets in the way of a prosecution.

“Is there going to be political interference? If there’s enough evidence to prosecute, will there be political interference?” Grassley said among reporters during a breakfast at the Des Moines A.M. Rotary club, according to the Des Moines Register. “And if there’s political interference, then I assume that somebody in the FBI is going to leak these reports and it’s either going to have an effect politically or it’s going to lead to prosecution if there’s enough evidence.”

A reporter followed up on Grassley’s supposition, asking him if he believed the FBI should leak what it finds.

“I wouldn’t be encouraging it because if it’s a violation of law, I can’t be encouraging a violation of law,” Grassley said. “This is kind of my own opinion, this is something I’ve heard.”

Right. It’s not “encouraging” for the Chairman of the senate Judiciary Committee to be telling the public that members of the FBI will leak information if they don’t like the decision of their bosses in the Department of Justice.

But he’s right that he’s “heard” it. He’s also seen it. During the Whitewater witch hunts, it happened all the time. They leaked whatever pieces of information they thought would politically harm their targets and and withheld the exculpatory evidence that led the DOJ (or the Independent Counsel) to be unable to to prosecute. There are plenty of conservative FBI agents, including the head of the FBI, who might like to try again to destroy a Democratic president. It’s uniquely irresponsible for a Senator to encourage them to do it. But it’s nothing new …

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Devious Donald

by digby

Charlie Pierce’s crystal ball is on the money:

This will now be the pattern. He, Trump will campaign thuggishly. It will work. Then he will accept victory less thuggishly, and he will be congratulated for it. Then it all will start again, over and over, all the way to November.

 Trump’s system-is-rigged message is relatively simple and plays into the media’s master narrative of the Republican race as a conflict between the Republican base and the GOP “establishment.” The Republicans’ delegate selection rules, by contrast, require an attention to detail that narrative-driven stories about the Republican race can misconstrue. Take this recent article from Jonathan Martin of The New York Times as an example; here’s how it begins:

With his thoroughly dominating performance on Tuesday in New York, Donald J. Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters. The question now is whether winning the most votes will be enough to make him the Republican nominee.

The volatile nominating contest has effectively spun off into two simultaneous races: one for votes and one for delegates. And they are starkly different.

Winning New York in a landslide — he captured all of the state’s 62 counties except his borough, Manhattan — Mr. Trump demonstrated the breadth of his support and his resilience in the aftermath of a loss in Wisconsin two weeks ago. With just 15 states remaining on the primary calendar, he has left little doubt about his popular appeal.

But the sturdy opposition to his candidacy within the party and his own organizational deficiencies have hampered him at the state and local level, where a byzantine process is underway to elect delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland this summer. Senator Ted Cruz has dominated that esoteric inside game until now. And if Mr. Trump falls short of clinching the nomination after all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories have held their contests, those delegates could make their own decisions after the first ballot in Cleveland.

There’s quite a bit to critique in this passage. To start, note how Martin asserts that “Trump proved that he remains the preferred candidate of most Republican primary voters.” In fact, Trump has won only 38 percent of the vote so far and has won a majority of the vote only in his home state of New York. Trump is unusually unpopular for a party front-runner — only about half of Republicans would be happy with him as their nominee — but he’s taken advantage of the divided opposition.

Doubling down on the past

by digby

This is the stuff that gets the base excited but it’s very short-sighted:

Conservative Republicans are worried that political correctness is creeping into their party.

They point to the decision by a House committee to replace 50 state flags — including Mississippi’s, which is emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag — with 50 state coins from the U.S. mint.

Separately, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) sidestepped the controversy this week raging over a North Carolina law barring transgender people from using bathrooms that do not match their born sex, saying he didn’t know enough about what he said was a state proposal.

And while conservative Republicans grumble that President Obama’s decision to pull Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 bill is playing politics with currency, they feel there’s scant motivation in their ranks to stop him.

“Political correctness has crept into the Capitol,” said David Bozell, president of ForAmerica, a conservative advocacy group.

Brian Darling, a conservative Republican strategist, accused House GOP leaders of caving in to the PC police.

“The House making the decision to take down all the flags so the Mississippi flag is not in the Capitol is a sign of political correctness,” he said. “Until the people of Mississippi decide they want to change it, Congress should fly the state flag.”

Taking umbrage at the “PC police” has been a go-to card for conservatives for years.

It’s been used to great success in this year’s presidential race by Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the party’s nomination.

Trump regularly faults the country for sliding into political correctness, an argument he’s used to parry criticism of statements he’s made about Mexico, women and Muslims.

While he called Tubman “fantastic” this week, he also criticized the decision to replace Jackson with her on the $20 bill as “pure political correctness.”

Last fall, he told a South Carolina audience “I’m so tired of this politically correct crap.”

Yet even Trump this week came under criticism from his GOP presidential rival Ted Cruz that he had bowed to political correctness by stating that the North Carolina bathroom law had done harm to the state.

Cruz’s campaign launched a new television ad Friday accusing Trump of joining “the ranks of the PC police” — a charge that would have been all but unimaginable a few weeks ago.

Conservatives fear that squeamishness on social controversies is linked to what they see as a lack of full commitment to confront Democrats on major policy issues, such as defunding Planned Parenthood.

They are also making the case that if the GOP cannot fight President Obama and Democrats on those issues, it is no wonder they can’t take more basic steps in governance.

“If you can’t say that guys should be going to the bathroom in men’s rooms and women should have the privacy they’re entitled to, if you can’t make that case as a leader of the Republican Party, no wonder you can’t get a budget through,” Bozell said this week.

I suppose they have no choice. Their constituency is dug in and there’s no getting them out of it. But leadership is going to be required by somebody to get them out of this trap. There’s little evidence of it coming from the political class. Industry is showing some spine on the ridiculous transgender discrimination and have been helpful with the confederate flag nonsense. There’s little evidence they care about immigrant or women’s right’s however. You can’t count on them for social justice — their motives are pecuniary. Political leadership will have to emerge eventually but there’s little sign of it yet.

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Trump’s gangsters

by digby

Nice little convention you’re planning be a shame if anything happened to … you:

First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cellphone and told him to put a gun down his throat.

“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes, and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you,’” House recalled.

Since Donald Trump came up empty in his quest for delegates at the Republican state assembly in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago, his angry supporters have responded to Trump’s own claims of a “rigged” nomination process by lashing out at Republican National Committee delegates that they believe won’t support Trump at the party’s convention — including House.

The mild-mannered chairman estimates he’s gotten between 4,000 and 5,000 calls on his cellphone. Many, he says, have ended with productive conversations. He’s referred the more threatening, violent calls to police. His cellphone is still buzzing this week, as he attends the RNC quarterly meetings in Florida, and he’s not the only one.

In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chairman says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if Trump doesn’t win the GOP presidential nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”

The threats come months ahead of a possible contested convention, where Trump is all but certain to enter with a plurality of delegates bound to him on the first ballot, but he could lose support on subsequent ballots, as rules will allow delegates to vote however they choose. And although the harassers are typically anonymous, many party leaders on the receiving end of these threats hold Trump himself at least partly responsible, viewing the intimidation efforts as a natural and obvious outgrowth of the candidate’s incendiary rhetoric.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The party chairman who said a Trump backer threatened “bloodshed” at the convention also said the man told him he would “‘meet me at the barricades’ if Trump isn’t the nominee.” The chairman spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump is personally responsible for this. He’s railing about the whole system being rigged and these delegates being corrupt. He’s egging his thuggish followers on, just as he does at his rallies.

This is nothing to mess around with. His entire message has been overtly violent:

by digby

Never ones to disappoint, the Hamilton cast joined mourning Prince fans by surprising their Thursday evening show with a stirring tribute. Before production’s end, everybody had gathered onstage at the Richard Rodgers Theatre for an appropriately crazy, dance-y rendition of the Purple One’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda explained afterward that Ham’s musical director Alex Lacamoire had spent the day orchestrating it. “Good night guys,” Miranda tweeted. “Today we laughed, we cried, we mourned, we danced. What more could we ask of that electric word, life?”