Author: Tom Sullivan

Which one are you working for?
by Tom Sullivan

Those of us already pondering how to approach 2106 campaigns follow in Robert Woolley’s footsteps. The strategist for Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 presidential reelection campaign originated using message control, targeting, and opposition research, say Washington Post’s Dan Balz and John Maxwell Hamilton of Louisiana State University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Campaign technologies have changed more than many tactics, they argue.

But to fight its way back after a disastrous 2014, Democrats will have to do better than more of the same in 2016. The left will have to step up its game, writes Sean McElwee. Much more than a standard bearer, the left needs a movement:

The left must remember that leaders do not make movements; rather, movements make leaders. Instead of vacillating from one hero to another, the left must create a formidable power base from which to both defeat Republicans and shift Democrats to the left.

Turnout increases with income, McElwee writes, which leads Democrats to target higher income voters groups that do turn out. This compounds with them favoring policies that appeal to higher income voters, leaving poor non-voters even less incentive to go to the polls.

Mass mobilization of core constituencies is the first key to winning. Problem is, the very solutions McElwee offers are the ones Republicans — now in control of roughly 70 percent of state legislatures — are systematically targeting: eliminating same-day registration and expanding ID requirements. Not to mention eliminating or shortening early voting.

Party leaders cultivating more progressive candidates would help, especially more workers and African American candidates to help boost turnout among the half of Americans with working-class jobs. “The good news,” McElwee reports, “is that research suggests that people of color are actually just as likely as white candidates to win: the problem is that they often don’t run.”

Obviously. But there’s a reason for that besides old-boy gatekeepers among Democrats’ leadership. Money.

Legislation and regulations aimed at getting money out of politics is another obvious solution McElwee offers (like same-day registration, etc.) that both lower barriers to entry and tend to favor the left’s base voters. But we have a chicken-and-egg problem. If you expect to pass them, you have to have control, but how do you get control unless you pass them?

But McElwee nails the master solution, saying, “a progressive America will require work.” Working Families Party and groups such as New York Communities for Change have busted their tails to advance just the kind of policies that benefit Democratic constituencies and candidates.

I can’t count the times I’ve heard from a disgruntled progressive, “We need a third party in this country.” My response is always the same.

“I can name a half-dozen third parties off the top of my head. Which one are you working for?”

Sadly, that usually ends the conversation.

“Over to you, welcome to the fight”
by Tom Sullivan

Bill Moyers’ show may have signed off last night, but as Digby noted, he’ll continue at his website to do what he’s done for so many decades. Moyers closes out his show with a message both of apology and encouragement to the next generation:

BILL MOYERS: Mary Christina Wood reminds us that democracy, too is a public trust – a reciprocal agreement between generations to keep it in good repair and pass it along. Our country’s DNA carries an inherent promise for every citizen of an equal opportunity at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our history resonates with the hallowed idea – hallowed by blood – of government of, by, and for the people. Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society. In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Yet look at just a few recent headlines: this one from “The New York Times”: “U.S. Wealth Gap Is Widest in Decades”. From the website Alternet: “Just 40 Americans Own As Much Wealth As Half the United States.” From Slate.com: “The Great Wealth Meltdown: Middle-Class Families Are Worth Less Today Than in 1969.” And from “The Economist”: “Wealth without workers, workers without wealth,” pointing to the reality that “for all but an elite few, work no longer guarantees a rising income.”

So as the next generation steps forward, I am tempted to think that the only thing my generation can say to them is: we’re sorry. Sorry for the mess you’re inheriting. Sorry we broke the trust. But I know in my heart that’s not what they ask or expect. So instead I recommend to them the example of Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, another of my heroes from the past. He battled the excesses of the first Gilded Age a century ago so boldly and proudly that he went down in history as “Fighting Bob.” He told us, “…democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle.” I keep asking myself, what if that struggle is the palpable reality without which this world would be truly barren?

So to this new generation I say: over to you, welcome to the fight.

Speaking of Wisconsin, I guess my 80-something aunt in Milwaukee (who still canvasses) won’t have reason to call me on Saturdays anymore to ask if I caught Moyers’ show. Over to me.

By their outrage, ye shall know them
By Tom Sullivan

Something Amanda Marcotte wrote parenthetically on New Year’s Eve caught my attention. On Christmas, Neil deGrasse Tyson typed out this Tweet most of you have already seen:

On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) December 25, 2014

“War on Christmas” soldiers were like boxers in their corner, gripping the ropes and bouncing on their toes, just waiting for the bell to ring. Tyson’s Tweet knocked the big chip off their shoulders, and out they came. Marcotte wrote:

Right-wing Christians, already primed to be hostile to anyone who values evidence and facts over myths about the supernatural, claimed that Tyson was deliberately provoking them. (Why they allowed themselves to be provoked, if this is what they believe, remains a mystery.) Odds are it was just Tyson being Tyson, grabbing any opportunity he can to educate people about science and push people to ask questions and learn more about the world. The ugly reaction from right-wing Christians only served to make them look close-minded and afraid of learning new things, which Tyson later pointed out on Twitter, writing, “Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.”

Why they allowed themselves to be provoked, if this is what they believe, remains a mystery.

Indeed. In my experience, the more confident you are in your opinions, the less threatened you are by others’ views. As Jefferson wrote, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” That is, what’s it to me what you believe? Then again, if everyone adopted Jefferson’s attitude, Fox News’ business model would collapse like the derivatives market in 2008.

If their god is God (as Yul Brynner might say), why do they feel it necessary to defend the Creator of the Universe from Neil deGrasse Tyson? Presumably, God is perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and is even less threatened by what Darwin Tyson thinks than Jefferson would be. Unless (as you guessed), it’s not God who is threatened. To borrow from Matthew’s gospel, by their outrage, ye shall know them.

Okay, but we can say the same of many on the left — always spoiling for a fight with conservative opponents, eager to vanquish their adversaries with the power of their supposed superior command of the facts, and way too eager to humiliate them. It’s a guilty pleasure that reinforces the worst “elitist” stereotypes of the left. While it may be intellectually satisfying to engage in such verbal combat, it likely won’t win friends and influence voters. As the saying goes, “You don’t have to attend every argument to which you are invited.” Leaping into a fight when baited is not a sign of strength.

A close friend once related how at a meeting of her condo owners’ association, some guy verbally attacked her when she asked for clarification on a new rule. I’ll never forget her reply. It was almost Zen.

“Didn’t you read the memo?” he snarled.

Keeping her cool, she turned to him in front of the crowd and asked calmly, “Do you have a need to pick a fight with me tonight?”

He withered and slumped back into his chair.

Gettin’ medieval
by Tom Sullivan

With 2014 gone (and good riddance), perhaps in 2015 America will look itself in the mirror and reflect on what it means to behave as if civilized rules only apply to everyone else. We look somewhat less exceptional from across the pond. Take this op-ed from Christian Christensen, a professor in Stockholm, for example:

… 2014 has been a year in which the mythology of domestic U.S. legal egalitarianism — reinforced by the mantra of blind justice and a near religious reverence of the U.S. Constitution — was exposed as a pretense. As abroad, so at home: Some people are more equal than others.

After the police killings of unarmed black men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner; after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma; after the SCCI report on a torture program approved by the White House — more brutal than the world already knew, and in violation of domestic and international law; and after a majority of Americans when asked approved the torture; on reflection, exceptionalism looks more like license. There are not two sets of rules in America, Christensen concludes, but three: “one for white killers, one for black killers and one for police officers who killed black suspects.” And a fourth for rich, Wall Street bankers, I might add.

Christensen continues:

One thread ties together all these cases: The willingness of the U.S. to bend the law and condone the barbaric treatment of human beings is grounded in differences of race, ethnicity or religion. Police violence, the death penalty and torture are predominantly applied to nonwhites or non-Christians. How supportive would white Americans and lawmakers be of procedures such as “rectal rehydration” — a gruesome procedure that, according to the torture report, was applied to hunger-striking inmates — if they were performed on white Christians? How long would they would be to willing to tolerate routine police killings of unarmed white citizens?

It all seems, I don’t know, a little medieval:

Perhaps critics are right. Perhaps we’ve been wrong to base interrogation and prisoner treatment on traditions and superstitions of past centuries. Maybe as citizens of a democratic republic we should strive in the 21st century to live up to our lofty, Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all. Maybe instead of falling prey to jingoism, we should reflect, examine our assumptions analytically, through experimentation and a “scientific method”. Maybe this scientific method could be extended to other fields of learning: the natural sciences, art, architecture, law. Perhaps it could lead the way to a new age, an age of rebirth, a Renaissance! … Naaaaaahhh!

What’s left of our schools once the Midas cult moves on?
by Tom Sullivan

What happens to America and its children once investment gurus decide the K-12 market is no longer the place to invest money? When education is no longer the Big Enchilada? When they dump their charter schools back on the states? Or raze them to build condos?

Those who have followed the school deform movement know that standing just behind parents expressing genuine concern for their children are investors. Millionaires and billionaires are targeting public education for the same reason banksters pimped mortgage loans. For the same reason Wall Street tried to privatize Social Security. For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks.

What is the largest portion of the budget in all 50 states?

As I wrote after the Center for Media and Democracy posted online a trove of ALEC documents:

The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.

But first, the “risk takers” must remove anyone that stands between them and that steady, recession-proof, government-guaranteed stream of public tax dollars. Teachers, and state and local boards of education, for example. The Midas cult won’t stop until it turns our daughters and our sons into gold, and maybe not then. If there is anything more addictive than wealth, it’s the power it brings.

Henry Giroux has been writing about that power for some time. He is back this week at Truthout with “Barbarians at the Gates: Authoritarianism and the Assault on Public Education.” Giroux writes:

Equality, justice and the search for truth no longer define the mission of public education. Economic policies that benefit the bankers, corporations and the financial elite result in massive inequities in wealth, income and power and increasingly determine how the US public views both public education and the needs of young people.

The shortsightedness of the investor class is as stunning as its avarice. And its fickleness. Once the Great Eye looks elsewhere, what will remain of public education and public infrastructure past generations paid for in taxes and sweat to make America a world power? Once demolished, how will we rebuild when the Midas cult inevitably moves on to its next shiny, new investment opportunity? Of these “dangerous times,” Giroux continues:

The struggle for public education as a crucial civic resource and public good must continue through the large-scale organizing of teachers and labor unions, students and groups outside of education who are also struggling against a range of injustices. The struggle over public education cannot be removed from wider struggles against student debt, funding for public goods, the elimination of massive inequalities in wealth and power, the elimination of the military-industrial-security state, the abolition of police brutality, and the eradication of the punishing-mass incarceration state, among other struggles. These struggles all share underlying interests in restoring and reclaiming a notion of radical democracy that puts power in the hands of the people rather than in the hands of the ruling elites. They also intersect around the need to elevate social needs over the narrow interests of the market and those elites who benefit from the financialization of society.

Because what the privatization of public education is leading to, Giroux believes, is “a new form of authoritarianism,” a democracy stripped of agency, a kind of “totalitarianism with elections.” It is a betrayal of the founders’ vision, one we are meant to forget. As I have written before:

John Adams (a tea party favorite) wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

To that purpose, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution) called for new states formed from what is now the American Midwest to encourage “schools and the means of education,” and the Enabling Act of 1802 signed by President Thomas Jefferson … required — as a condition of statehood — the establishment of schools and public roads, funded in part by the sale of public lands. Enabling acts for later states followed the 1802 template, establishing permanent funds for public schools, federal lands for state buildings, state universities and public works projects (canals, irrigation, etc.), and are reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The practice continued up to and including the enabling act for the admission of Hawaii in 1959 as America’s 50th state, for example (emphasis added):

(f) The lands granted to the State of Hawaii by subsection (b) of this section and public lands retained by the United States under subsections (c) and (d) and later conveyed to the State under subsection (e), together with the proceeds from the sale or other disposition of any such lands and the income therefrom, shall be held by said State as a public trust for the support of the public schools and other public educational institutions, for the betterment of the conditions of native Hawaiians, as defined in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended, for the development of farm and home ownership on as widespread a basis as possible for the making of public improvements, and for the provision of lands for public use. Such lands, proceeds, and income shall be managed and disposed of for one or more of the foregoing purposes in such manner as the constitution and laws of said State may provide, and their use for any other object shall constitute a breach of trust for which suit may be brought by the United States. The schools and other educational institutions supported, in whole or in part out of such public trust shall forever remain under the exclusive control of said State; and no part of the proceeds or income from the lands granted under this Act shall be used for the support of any sectarian or denominational school, college, or university.

Just a half-century ago, that is what America valued, and what we believed in. That centuries-old tradition and American birthright is now being plundered by people whose threadbare code seems to be, “Well, a man’s got to believe something, and I believe I’ll have another million.”

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Education: Testing the testers
by Tom Sullivan
As someone pointed out the other day, in some circles increased oversight of the police and the military is deemed improper and/or unpatriotic, yet other public employees are fair game. Public school teachers, for instance. Even as tests required under No Child Left Behind come under fire, teachers themselves face increased screening tests using “Big Data, ‘Moneyball’-style” tools. As Politico reports, “Prices vary widely, from $5,000 for a small district to $500,000 for a large district, depending on the product.”
Are they useful, or just another opportunity for investors to turn kids into cash?

The new screening tools slice and dice aspiring teachers into dozens of data points, from their SAT scores to their appreciation for art to their ability to complete geometric patterns. All that data is then fed into an algorithm that spits out a score predicting the likelihood that each candidate will become an effective teacher — or, at least, will be able to raise students’ math and reading scores.

The tools seek to cut through hiring biases that favor “geographic proximity” or “teachers with last names starting with the letters A through G” because résumés get alphabetized. But critics contend there is no magic formula for revealing who makes the best teacher.

“The search for a formula … just isn’t realistic, at least not at the present time,” said Gerardo González, dean of the School of Education at Indiana University.
González said he fears that the formula approach, which he calls “reductionist,” will scare bright young people away from the teaching profession at a time when many education colleges already report declining enrollments.

Plus, from what I hear on the ground, teachers fed up with increased bureaucratic micromanagement are leaving the profession, or considering it. With educational versions of Omni Consumer Products flexing their political muscles, that may be the goal. Politico continues:

Another screening tool, Paragon K12, which is sold by Hanover Research, produces an overall score for each applicant, known as the Student Achievement Index. It aims to quantify how likely it is that the candidate will boost student test scores.
Districts using the tool also get a breakdown of each applicant’s performance on measures of general intelligence, extrovertedness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability, among others.

You wonder how the NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association would respond to the increased scrutiny.

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Accountability and obeisanceby Tom Sullivan While munching on vegetarian everything at a Harmonic Convergence potluck in 1987, people quietly fled the kitchen when a friend and I (two engineers) began discussing the military’s propensity for buying guns that can’t shoot straight and amphibious vehicles that sink. It was one thing for lefties to oppose Pentagon spending, and quite another to besmirch your white-vinyl soul by knowing anything about it. The Atlantic has in its current issue an article about a rifle the Pentagon is still buying, one designed over a half century ago. For James Fallows, lack of accountability for the military in both performance and procurement stems from the Washington-like bubble we insist the military inhabit. As Fallows begins in his latest for the Atlantic, “[W]e love the troops, but we’d rather not think about them.” With less than one percent of Americans at risk under fire, “Fewer and fewer people know anyone in the military. It’s become just too easy to go to war.” On the history of that disconnectedness, Fallows writes:

If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously.

Much as we discussed in that kitchen conversation 30 years ago, military procurement is still a problem fraught with political machinations. There is a lot of money at stake in maintaining a global empire, and it persists unchecked even as we cut spending at home, you know, for food (SNAP). As I wrote in 2012:

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

Fallows continues on that process:

… such is the dysfunction and corruption of the budgeting process that even as spending levels rise, the Pentagon faces simultaneous crises in funding for maintenance, training, pensions, and veterans’ care. “We’re buying the wrong things, and paying too much for them,” Charles A. Stevenson, a onetime staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former professor at the National War College, told me. “We’re spending so much on people that we don’t have the hardware, which is becoming more expensive anyway. We are flatlining R&D.”

The latter half of Fallows’ piece examines the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. That it is insanely over budget and wracked with technical issues should come as no surprise. One wonders how many joints were involved in its conception. Fallows also looks at how our relationship to the military has changed since WWII when 10 percent of Americans were serving in it. As we have become more disconnected from the military, we have fallen into rote “’salute to the heroes’ gestures that do more for the civilian public’s self-esteem than for the troops’.” That disconnectedness leads to a lack of accountability. Lincoln removed generals for military failings. We remove them for personal foibles. But what Fallows does not address is whether the disconnectedness and lack of accountability he describes — combined with our nagging economic uncertainty and fear-flogging by the press — fosters tolerance for growing authoritarianism. Or at least a deference to it. The same unquestioning, knee-jerk obeisance we’re supposed to give “our troops” seems now to extend to the police as well. In light of the recent police shooting incidents and the reaction of the NYPD, it seems police now expect demand obeisance and immunity from accountability.

2015: Imagine greaterby Tom Sullivan “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
— Ursula Le Guin, accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 2014 National Book Awards So much of what bloggers write about is serendipity. Sometimes focusing fiercely on a single topic and searching out components to flesh out an idea, or else grazing the Net at random for articles that spark one, or sometimes just happening upon ideas floating around that connect in ways that say something about the zeitgeist. This morning I ran across this post on Raw Story featuring Ursula Le Guin’s speech at the National Book Awards ceremony in November:

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality. … Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art — the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

The very next link led to a terrific read by Rebecca Solnit at Salon. In a San Francisco junk shop, she had come upon a document dating from the French Revolution that reminded her of the very Le Guin speech I had just seen:

That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere). Americans are skilled at that combination of complacency and despair that assumes things cannot change and that we, the people, do not have the power to change them. Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well).

The rest is about the global fight to rein in fossil fuels and combat climate change. But most inspiring is her account of a battle by Mayor Gayle McLaughin and progressive residents of Richmond, California to take on — and defeat — Chevron in a company town and get the firm to pay an additional $114 million in taxes to clean up the town and lower its crime rate:

For this November’s election, the second-largest oil company on Earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughin and other progressive candidates and install a mayor and council more to its liking. That sum worked out to about $180 per Richmond voter, but my brother David, who’s long been connected to Richmond politics, points out that, if you look at all the other ways the company spends to influence local politics, it might be roughly ten times that. Nonetheless, Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else a lavishly funded smear campaign can come up with, won.

Since Democrats’ losses in the November elections, most news outlets have focused what the left lost across the country, while ignoring such victories. I point out to any who will listen that while Democrats lost across the South, here in North Carolina, even as Sen. Kay Hagan narrowly lost her reelection bid, Democrats gained seats in the state legislature. And in districts drawn to be safe Republican seats. Instead of wringing our hands over what went wrong, progressives might want to look more closely at places like Richmond to learn from what went right. “The Richmond progressives won,” Solnit writes, “by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable, no less an eternal way of life.” Imagine greater is not just a cable channel’s slogan. Who ever thought we’d see a pope advocating progressive ideas? Pope Francis is jumping into the climate change fight in a big way in 2015, including issuing a much-anticipated encyclical and taking on Vatican conservatives on the climate issue:

According to Vatican insiders, Francis will meet other faith leaders and lobby politicians at the general assembly in New York in September, when countries will sign up to new anti-poverty and environmental goals. In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. “The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands. “The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

Imagine that.

Addicted to fear
by Tom Sullivan

Dave Weigel sees all the fuss over The Interview and threats from “Guardians of Peace” hackers against theaters as another case of public overreaction to a perceived threat:

The incident-free Interview screenings should be remembered alongside two other overhyped 2014 fears: the Ebola panic and the reaction to ISIS. The latter stories were handled even worse, because they happened during an election, and because some candidates created a feedback loop of childish speculation that Ebola could spread by sneezes, or that virus-laden ISIS terrorists could stalk across the Mexican border. All of these people were wrong, and thanks to the amnesiac nature of the news cycle, they might never have to answer for that. (Being wildly wrong on live TV during crises is a good way to secure a return invitation.)

Weigel quotes Ohio State University professor, John Mueller, who tracks terrorist incidents: “The lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000–about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor.”

But the 9/11 attacks have so shaken this country’s confidence that Americans now routinely overreact to the slightest perceived threat. It is something Osama bin Laden knew would happen and something the American right’s Noise Machine has used to jerk its listeners’ chains for years. Americans of a certain sort are easily spooked.

After six years of Obama’s tyrannical, iron-fisted rule, I’m still waiting for his jack-booted thugs to kick in my door and confiscate my weapons. Since he took office, the NRA has promised us Obama would be coming for my guns, and so far nada. He’s running out of time the way gun stores have been running out of ammo.

Staying afraid is almost an addiction. After enough regular doses, I wonder if the brain takes a certain “set” the way depression can become a habit?

(Updated to correct spelling of John Mueller.)

What’s in a racial label?
by Tom Sullivan

Esther J. Cepeda’s Washington Post op-ed discusses a study by Emory University researchers, “A rose by any other name?: The consequences of subtyping ‘African-Americans’ from ‘Blacks’”. Specifically, the study looked at how white people responded to the two terms and their attached stereotypes. Notice, there’s as much class as race here:

The researchers conducted four distinct studies in the realms of employment, media and criminal justice to determine the perceptions of the two labels in different contexts.

The data they collected point to whites believing that the label “Black” evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status, education, positivity, competence and warmth than the label “African-American.” And whites “will react more negatively” toward “Blacks” than toward “African-Americans.”

Even more chilling, the researchers found that use of the label “Black” in a newspaper crime report is associated with more negative emotional words than in an article featuring the words “African-American.” And whites view a criminal suspect more negatively when that person is identified as “Black” versus “African-American.”

Wonder how they’d react to calling them “citizens” or “people”? Or “neighbors”?

I noticed how both Cepeda and I both typed lower case above when writing “white” as though it is an ordinary adjective and less of a racial label, while the study prefers “White.” Race is always there, Cepeda notes, because “no matter how post-racial any of us thinks we are, we’re all carrying around varying degrees of racial and ethnic bias.”

For example, this reference in the report to another study jumped out at me for some reason:

Participants, who were predominantly White Americans, rated “poor Blacks” low in both warmth and competence and perceived them similarly to poor Whites and welfare recipients (Figure 1, p. 885, 887, Fiske et al., 2002). Conversely, participants rated “Black professionals” as having high competence and high warmth and perceived them similarly to Americans, the middle class, Christians, the Irish, and housewives (Figure 2, p. 638, Cuddy et al., 2007).

The Irish? HEY! What’s up with that?