Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The future is fun! The future is fair!

Some of us have learned to refrain from issuing hot takes on developing stories. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating when the press holds back from stating the obvious. I still recall the hour or more of “we don’t know what happened yet” reporting when the Challenger exploded (1986) shortly after launch, even as TV ran and re-ran footage of the explosion and we watched the detached bosters, still firing, fly wildy across the sky. Other times, as in last week’s Canada/U.S. border crash, there is a race to sensationalize in the absence of facts.

Will Bunch opens his Sunday column with an Orwell quote:

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984

The lie that the bridge crash was a terrorist attack from Canada spread before the flames from the burning Bentley subsided. First the truth:

Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y. — Monica and Kurt Villani — were driving to a casino in Canada in a Bentley luxury car because of a canceled rock concert when something went terribly wrong. Approaching the Rainbow Bridge border post, the car was traveling 80 to 100 mph — perhaps due to a medical emergency, or a stuck accelerator — and struck a curb, sending the Bentley into the air before a fiery crash and explosion that killed both occupants.

The FBI and police naturally had to rule out terrorism before turning to that more mundane explanation. But before the facts became known, outlets like Fox ran with fear-mongering speculation.

“What I’ve been told is that this was an attempted terrorist attack,” said Alexis McAdams, a correspondent for Fox News, the right-slanted network that despite a series of scandals and mishaps is still the most-watched cable news channel. Reporting just two and a half hours after the crash, McAdams added that her law enforcement sources believed that the motorists — in reality, remember, two middle-aged KISS fans — “have packed that car full of explosives.”

A-a-a-nd the demagogues were off:

“We need to lock down the borders immediately,” GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida posed on X/Twitter Wednesday. “Full deportation efforts need to begin. The U.S. does not need to be the world’s hospitality suite any longer.” Added another Florida Republican, Rep. Byron Donalds, in a now deleted tweet: “Open borders, soft-on-crime policies and bending a knee to the woke P.C. mob is an inevitable threat to our nation and its people. Today’s apparent terrorist attack must be a wake-up call to all Americans.”

The website Meidas Touch published a list of more than 30 Republican officials or right-wing luminaries who tweeted similar sentiments and occasionally embellished their posts with new made-up details, like the discovery of an Iranian passport at the crash site. Some of these posts are still up, days after it became clear that the Niagara Falls crash was just a horrific tragedy and not the far-right’s fever dream of Islamic jihad to justify a repressive response. Others, including Fox News, have ripped yet another page from George Orwell’s 1984 — tossing their initial reporting down a memory hole.

Except what my post below suggests is that, like discredited scientific studies, discredited “news” will persist in cyberspace and be cited as true facts obscured by a government coverup for years to come. It works for them.

This kind of propaganda is designed to further destabilize the country and to prepare it for a strong man, even if it’s not Donald Trump.

For millions of U.S. web surfers and couch potatoes, the mental connection of Biden, the border and fiery chaos had already been implanted, and it will remain even as some of the erroneous tweets are deleted. And that sense that things are out of control in America is already being used to sell them on a rule-breaking strongman in the White House. That will be used in a Trump 47 presidency to actually carry out Luna’s howling at the moon, to deport so many migrants that America will need a gulag archipelago of camps to hold them.

The Niagara Falls panic didn’t happen in a vacuum, after all. It happened in the same week that Argentina elected a right-wing extremist president in Javier Milei, that the anti-immigration party of radical Geert Wilders won the most seats in the Netherlands parliament, that a fake rumor about the immigration status of a stabbing attacker sparked a destructive riot in Dublin — and that polls show Trump edging into the lead over Biden ahead of 2024′s election.

We can see where the right wants to take the country. But let’s not get out over our skis about those Trump-Biden polls. Like polling about the economy, they are likely skewed by Republican respondents’ same tribal detachment from reality about the economy:

A pair of economists who examined decades of polling data concluded, “While both Republicans and Democrats view the economy more favorably when their party controls the White House, the magnitude of this partisan bias is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans than for Democrats.”

Factor that two and a half times into reading any polling about the 2024 election. It’s a feature, not a bug. Truth and pants, you know?

The Doctor is AI

Forget that we cannot trust self-driving cars and that those flying ones we were promised remain elusive. Two random items this morning reinforce concerns about AI.

This one:

Followed by this one:

Science is an imperfect process, the Hill opinion notes. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds.” The problem is that those zombie studies do not disappear simply because they’ve been retrcated. They continue to be cited “unwittingly“:

Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage.

AI relying on undigitized medical knowledge from 1853 may seem unlikely. But relying on 40,000 retracted studies still floating around?

I dredged this up from the summer based on a comment in the Blue Sky thread:

Cigna is using an algorithm to review — and often reject — hundreds of thousands of patient health insurance claims, a new lawsuit claims, with doctors rubber-stamping those denials without individually reviewing each case. 

{…}

The litigation highlights the growing use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to handle tasks that were once routinely handled by human workers. At issue in health care is whether a computer program can provide the kind of “thorough, fair, and objective” decision that a human medical professional would bring in evaluating a patient’s claim. 

“Relying on the PXDX system, Cigna’s doctors instantly reject claims on medical grounds without ever opening patient files, leaving thousands of patients effectively without coverage and with unexpected bills,” the suit alleges.

The Doctor is AI:

“The chatbot is here to see you” (Politico):

Right now, no fewer than half of health care organizations are planning to use some kind of generative AI pilot program this year, according to a recent report by consulting firm Accenture. Some could involve patients directly. AI could make it easier for patients to understand a providers’ note, or listen to visits and summarize them.

But what about… you know, actual doctoring? So far, in limited research, chatbots have proven decent at asking simple health questions. Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and Stanford recently asked ChatGPT 25 questions on heart disease prevention. Its responses were appropriate for 21 of 25, including on how to lose weight and reduce cholesterol.

But it stumbled on more nuanced questions, including in one instance “firmly recommending” cardio and weightlifting, which could be dangerous for some patients.

Steven Lin, a physician and executive director of the Stanford Healthcare AI Applied Research Team, said that the models are fairly solid at getting things like medical school test questions right. However, in the real world, questions from patients are often messy and incomplete, Lin said, unlike the structured questions on exams.

I remain skeptical.

And can you blame them?

TPM reports:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is experiencing some political repercussions for dumping gasoline on his fractured party’s descent into dysfunction when he ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the sin of keeping the government open. While the congressman is still popular in his Panhandle home district, his standing in Florida overall is in a state of disrepair.

The Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet PolCom Lab released the results of statewide polling it conducted between Oct. 27 and Nov. 11 last week. It found that 57 percent of Florida voters are unhappy with Gaetz’s job as a congressman. That means that just 21 percent of voters surveyed approved of the congressman’s performance in Washington. About eight percent were “neutral” and 14 percent indicated they didn’t know how they felt, per the poll results.

When broken down by party, his approval rating is only a little less bleak. Among Democrats surveyed, almost 83 percent said they disapprove of the professional antagonist. But among Republicans, 36.3 percent disapprove of the congressman, with just 36.6 percent approving of his “work.” That’s less than the percentage of Republicans who responded to the same survey saying they approved of the decision to remove McCarthy as speaker — 42 percent. The Florida Atlantic University poll surveyed just under 1,000 Florida voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2%.

While Gaetz’s popularity in his home district is holding steady, his statewide disapproval follows news that the Republican may be interested in running for governor in 2026 when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is term-limited out of the governor’s mansion. NBC News reported in September that the congressman was “100 percent in” on a potential 2026 bid. Gaetz has denied that reporting, offering only that his sole “political focus right now is Trump 2024.

I won’t be surprised if he becomes Governor at some point, to tell you the truth. Florida has an incredibly record of electing creeps like Gaetz.

If you don’t watch Fox, as you shouldn’t, you miss the incisive reporting and analysis they provide.

Yes, the radical left commies, Marxist thugs like you and I hate pies. We really do. Especially apple pie which is, as you know, American. Because we hate America and don’t want it to be great again.

(Nobody wants to “take away” anyone’s gas stoves. The idea is that in the future new gas stoves will not come online and instead modern technology will be delivering a superior form of gas stove that isn’t going to kill the planet. Because we hate everyone.)

In case you are wondering what this is about, Kamala Harris and her husband Doug posted a picture of themselves on Thanksgiving with a pie in their kitchen, (at the Naval Observatory where they live? I don’t know.) This has turned into a viral sensation among the right wingers because it shows that they have a gas stove which makes them monstrous hypocrites who hate everyone and want t=people to suffer without any pies.

This is what we’re dealing with. Snotty, stupid. nasty little mean girls spouting nonsense. Tens of millions of people think this is awesome.

BTW: Just as a reminder, you are not allowed to call right wingers “deplorable” because it’s rude and disrespectful of them and their culture.

In all senses of the word

Via Axios:

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Friday he won’t resign from Congress but acknowledged he will likely be expelled as he lobbed salacious accusations at colleagues and called the chair of the Ethics Committee a “p***y”.

A growing number of lawmakers in both parties who previously voted against expelling Santos have flipped and now say they will vote to remove him following an explosive Ethics Committee report.

Santos said he knows he is “going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” adding: “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”

 In an X space hosted by journalist Monica Matthews, Santos said he is “not going to resign” because “[if] I resign, I admit everything that’s on that report.”

Santos said he will defend himself “to the end of time,” criticizing the Ethics Committee probe as biased and goading Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) to “stop being a p***y” and force a vote on his expulsion resolution.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) joined the space and urged Santos to make a “direct apology” to voters and resign because “we’re going to vote to expel you George.”

The Ethics Committee’s 56-page report said the panel’s bipartisan investigation found a “complex web of unlawful activity involving Representative Santos’ campaign, personal, and business finances.”

[…]

Santos threw out wild allegations against unnamed colleagues in an effort to cast his alleged extraordinary wrongdoing as the norm.

Santos said Congress is “felons galore” and filled with “people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds.”

He called his colleagues “a bunch of hypocrites,” accusing them of extramarital affairs, getting drunk with lobbyists and then missing votes due to hangovers, and handing out voting cards like “candy” to allow others to vote on their behalf.

Despite his ongoing legal troubles and likely expulsion, Santos said he is not ruling out another run for office and said he plans to stay involved in politics in some capacity.

“I definitely will not be going away … elected office is not off the table,” he said, though he added that he won’t run any time soon and he likely will never run for office again in New York.

Lol. Why not run for president? Apparently, you can do whatever you want if you’re a candidate and the law can’t stop you.

Seriously, I wouldn’t put it past this guy.

Looks like it…

Ed Kilgore on the latest:

Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return.

NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed:

The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%. …

CNN’s recent national poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.

Quinnipiac University had Biden ahead by 9 points in that subgroup.

The national Fox News poll had Biden up 7 points among that age group.

And the recent New York Times/Siena College battleground state polling had Biden ahead by just 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.

According to Pew’s validated voters analysis (which is a lot more precise than exit polls), Biden won under-30 voters by a 59 percent to 35 percent margin in 2020. Biden actually won the next age cohort, voters 30 to 49 years old, by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2016, Pew reports, Hillary Clinton won under-30 voters by a 58 percent to 28 percent margin, and voters 30 to 44 by 51 percent to 40 percent.

So one baby-boomer Democrat and one silent-generation Democrat kicked Trump’s butt among younger voters, despite the fact that both of them had their butts kicked among younger primary voters by Bernie Sanders. It’s these sort of numbers that led to a lot of optimistic talk about younger-generation voters finally building the durable Democratic majority that had eluded the party for so many years.

Then what’s gone wrong?

For one thing, it’s important to note that yesterday’s younger voters aren’t today’s, as Nate Silver reminds us:

Fully a third of voters in the age 18-29 bracket in the 2020 election (everyone aged 26 or older) will have aged out of it by 2024, as will two-thirds of the age 18-to-29 voters from the 2016 election and all of them from 2012. So if you’re inclined to think something like “gee, did all those young voters who backed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2012 really turn on Biden now?”, stop doing that. Those voters are now in the 30-to-41 age bracket instead.

But even within relatively recent groups of young voters, there are plenty of micro- and macro-level explanations available for changing allegiances. Young voters share the national unhappiness with the performance of the economy; many are particularly afflicted by high basic-living costs and higher interest rates that make buying a home or even a car unusually difficult. Some of them are angry at Biden for his inability (mostly thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) to cancel student-loan debts. And most notoriously, young voters are least likely to share Biden’s strong identification with Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas (a new NBC poll shows 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-old voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war).

More generally, intergenerational trust issues are inevitably reflected in perceptions of the president who is turning 81 this week, as youth-vote expert John Della Volpe recently explained:

Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?

All of these factors help explain why younger voters have soured on Uncle Joe and might be open to independent or minor-party candidates (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, or a possible No Labels candidate). But they don’t cast as much light on why these same voters might ultimately cast a ballot for Donald Trump.

Trump is less than four years younger than Biden and is about as un-hip an oldster as one can imagine. He’s responsible for the destruction of federal abortion rights, a deeply unpopular development among youth voters (post-election surveys in 2022 showed abortion was the No. 1 issue among under-30 voters; 72 percent of them favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases). His reputation for racism, sexism, and xenophobia ought to make him anathema to voters for whom the slogan “Make America Great Again” doesn’t have much personal resonance. And indeed, young voters have some serious issues with the 45th president, even beyond the subject of abortion. In the recent New York Times–Siena battleground state poll that showed Trump and Biden about even among under-30 voters, fully 64 percent of these same voters opposed “making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States,” a signature Trump position if ever there was one.

But at the same time, under-30 voters in the Times-Siena survey said they trusted Trump more on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden by a robust 49 percent to 39 percent margin. The 45th president, needless to say, has never shown any sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And despite the ups and downs in his personal relationship to Bibi Netanyahu, he was as close an ally to Israel’s Likud Party as you could imagine (among other things, Trump reversed a long-standing U.S. position treating Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank as a violation of international law and also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a gesture of great contempt toward Palestinian statehood). His major policy response to the present war has been to propose a revival of the Muslim travel ban the courts prevented him from implementing during his first term.

But perceptions often differ sharply from reality. Sixty-two percent of 18-to-29-year-old and 61 percent of 40-to-44-year-old voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy in the Times-Siena survey. It’s unclear whether these voters have the sort of hazy positive memories of the economy under Trump that older cohorts seem to be experiencing or if they instead simply find the status quo intolerable.

In any event, the estrangement of young voters provides the most urgent evidence of all that Team Biden and its party need to remind voters aggressively about Trump’s full-spectrum unfitness for another term in the White House. Aside from his deeply reactionary position on abortion and other cultural issues, and his savage attitude toward immigrants, Trump’s economic-policy history shows him prioritizing tax cuts for higher earners and exhibiting hostility to student-loan-debt relief (which he has called “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence”). Smoking out the 45th president on what “Trumponomics” might mean for young and nonwhite Americans should become at least as central to the Biden reelection strategy as improving the reputation of “Bidenomics.” And without question, Democrats who may be divided on the Israel-Hamas war should stop fighting each other long enough to make it clear that Republicans (including Trump) would lead cheers for the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank while agitating for war with Iran.

There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters. But it will require some serious work by Team Biden not only to turn these voters against the embodiment of their worst nightmares but to get them involved in the effort to keep him away from the power he would abuse.

To me, the single most persuasive way to convince these folks that Trump is not only not the answer but is the greatest threat to everything they hold dear is to show him in his own words. Everything they care about from the Palestinians to climate change to abortion to gun violence to racism and immigration and LGBTQ rights are at monumental risk if he is elected in 2024.

Many of them are too young to know much about him. Consider that some college freshmen were just 14 or 15 when he was in office. Some of the older ones weren’t paying attention. (Even a lot of full adults don’t seem to recall what he was like.)

They need to be reminded of “drink bleach” and “shithole countries” and “grab ’em by the pussy” and “shoot the protesters” and “windmills cause cancer” and “there has to be a punishment for the woman [if she has an abortion], on and on and on. That’s not even to mention the fact that he tried to steal the election and staged a coup. This all happened! If they knew, I believe that most of them would not want to vote for him.

Of course, the lure of the protest vote is always there and that, in my view, is the bigger problem. I have found throughout my life that trying to convince a young person that nobody gives a shit about their protest vote, certainly not the right wing asshole they help elect with it, and it never seems to penetrate. I just don’t know how to convince them that it does no good and that there is no moral superiority in enabling the worst of all choices.

It’s not just the younger people. The whole country needs to be reminded of what happened to us when this monster was in charge. It was a nightmare. And it will be a thousand times worse if he wins again. I can’t believe I live in a country where that’s even possible. It’s not as if most of us are not old enough to remember it.

It’s unbearable to even think about.

Thank you Philip Bump for this perfectly illustrated explanation of the question of life expectancy which I have tried to explain to people to no avail. For some reason this concept seems to be hard for some people to accept:

One day recently, three old friends met to play pickleball. Alan, 85, had taken up the sport first. Over time, he compelled his old college acquaintances Bob, 80, and Don, 75, to join him, in keeping with the rapidly growing sport’s slow downward trend in the median age of its participants.

On this day, though, Bob was preoccupied.

“Does it ever bother you guys,” he asked, as they were warming up, “that each of us is above the average life expectancy in the U.S.?” Bob, you see, was well-versed in government data, in part thanks to his willingness to indulge in the natural human inclination to want to understand and explore numbers.

And Bob was right. The most recent estimates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the year 2021, put American life expectancy at just over 76 years of age. That varies by race, with Asian Americans being estimated to live more than 83 years and Black Americans just under 71 years.

“I think about this a lot!” interjected Don. “Especially since men have even shorter life expectancies, regardless of age.” Don was not known as being particularly attentive to such intricacies, surprising his companions. But he’d spent an enormous amount of time over the prior 12 months considering the subject, as he believed that it was important for his plans.

And, again, this was correct. White men, like Don, had a life expectancy of just over 73 years in 2021. Among Black men, like Alan, the expectancy was under 67 years.

“You’re lucky,” replied Bob, who’d grown increasingly agitated. “You live in Florida, where life expectancies were slightly higher than the national figure in 2020. I live in Delaware, where life expectancies are even lower.” (If you are curious why Don and Bob were playing pickleball with Alan despite living in different states, it is because each of them had ready access to private aircraft for different reasons.)

“Well, that’s true,” Alan replied, joining the conversation at a useful pivot point. “But that’s because expectancy correlates to income, which correlates to race.”

“But regardless, you guys are completely missing the point,” he continued, now getting warmed up. (He was used to having to get Bob and Don to have to understand the bigger picture.) “What you’re talking about is life expectancy at birth, which isn’t what is important for us.”

Bob and Don looked at each other in confusion. Alan sighed.

“Think of it this way,” Alan continued. “Imagine there’s a houseplant that consistently lives for precisely 10 years. But there’s one exception: for the first year after it sprouts, 1 in 5 plants will suddenly die for inexplicable reasons.”

“So this plant lives an average of a bit over 8 years,” he said. “let’s just call that the life expectancy for the sake of the example. Once you’re past that first year, though? All of the plants will live to 10 years.”

“So a three-year-old plant has a life expectancy of 10 years?” Bob asked.

“No,” Alan replied. It has a life expectancy of seven years — seven more years.” Bob and Don looked at each other and nodded.

“That’s how the government publishes life expectancy data,” Alan said. “Americans born in 2021 were expected to live 76.1 years. But Americans who were 75 were expected to live 11.5 more years — to 86.5. And since people keep living past their life expectancies, the expectancy keeps going up over time.”

“What do you mean?” Don asked.

“Well, think of it this way,” Alan said. “A lot of people who were 75 in 2021 will live past 11 more years, past the age of 86. We need to recalculate life expectancies for those people — and it obviously has to be higher than 86!”

Alan grabbed his phone and pulled up the CDC data. No one objected; data is more interesting than pickleball.

“As ages increase, so do life expectancies,” Alan said, showing them a graph he found in a newsletter he subscribes to. “And, over time, the racial disparities in life expectancy mostly fade. Expectancies converge.”

The graph, well-designed and clear, made this obvious. For example, Black Americans have died younger than other groups for decades. Once Black Americans live to old age, though, their life expectancies match other groups.

“In fact,” Alan said, zooming in on the graph, “by the age of 85, Black Americans have higher life expectancies than Whites, even just among men. But its subtle.”

For Bob, though, something else about the graph leaped out at him.

“Wait,” he said, pointing at the chart. “This suggests that, according to 2021 estimates, I’d be expected to live nearly another eight years after I turned 80.”

“That’s right,” Alan replied. “And that’s with those 2021 estimates, reflecting the height of the pandemic. It’s expected that the new estimates will show life expectancies moving back up after multiple years of declines.”

“Oh, that’s a relief,” Bob said. “I’d been thinking about making a long-term, four-year commitment next year but was wondering whether that made sense, given that I’d be 86 when it ends. I guess I should have more confidence in my ability to fulfill that commitment than I assumed.”

Alan nodded. Bob looked relieved. Don, though, seemed irritated for some reason. And so ends our allegory.

Seems a better use of our energies

“You don’t get a lot of chances to correct history’s mistakes. You get a few. And when you get them, you damn sure better take advantage of them,” said environmental historian Dan Flores. He wasn’t talking about consigning the MAGA movement to the ash heap of history. He was talking about efforts to restore bison herds on the Great Plains:

In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the border of what is now North Dakota and Montana, they found herds of American buffalo so numerous, “the whole face of the country was covered” by them, Meriwether Lewis wrote. Less than a century later, in 1889, the nation’s most majestic animal (whose scientific name is Bison bison) had been reduced from practically uncountable numbers to an easily countable 541, and the species teetered on the edge of extinction.

Today their numbers stand at about 350,000, most raised as livestock.

Only 20,000 of them are protected in federal and state preserves in what are called conservation herds. Meanwhile, some ranchers and nonprofit environmental organizations are trying to provide buffalo with something closer to the habitats they once knew: more room to roam and native grasses to eat. Under those conditions, the bison can reclaim their former role as the “keystone” species of the prairies, improving conditions for all other species to thrive.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, herself a Native American, has a $25 million initiative to “combine bison restoration with grassland restoration, making large swaths of the prairies healthier and helping them store more carbon to combat climate change.”

The Pentagon loses far more each year in its couch cushions.

For Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa from North Dakota, the buffalo is “a symbol of our existence and the symbol of our difficulties,” but it can become a symbol of so much more. “When you look at a buffalo, you don’t just see a big shaggy beast standing there,” he said. “You see life. You see existence. You see hope. You see prayer. And you see the future for your young, the future for those not yet born. And if we give the buffalo a chance, like I think we should, it will strengthen us not only as human beings but as Americans.”

This new chapter in our nation’s complicated and sometimes tortured history is poised to move beyond the restoration of a shaggy but majestic animal. If given a chance, the buffalo can lead us toward a long delayed reconciliation with the first people who inhabited the bounteous land we all now call home — and into a future every American can be proud of.

Just don’t be the type of American idiot who puts a juvenile bison into a van or a juvenile fascist into the White House.

Some are gospel, others mere suggestions

It helps that the Second Amendment has a powerful manufacturing lobby behind it. It helps that the press, churches, and the ACLU stand behind the First. Case after case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court about those. The problem, of course, is that other, better-funded conservative advocacy groups exist to make application of the Constitution’s provisions as selective as possible as Frank Wilhoit so adroitly observed, if only by implication.

Poor little 14th Amendment. It’s long as amendments go (the longest). Maybe that’s why its application has been so contested and/or ignored. Too long to read? Or perhaps too radical to enforce.

Sherrilyn Ifill writes in the Washington Post:

I use the word “radical” deliberately. The 14th Amendment was conceived of and pushed by the “Radical Republicans” in Congress after the Civil War. They were so named because of their commitment to eradicating slavery and its vestiges from American political life. A number had been abolitionists, and all had seen the threat that white supremacist ideology and the spirit of insurrection posed to the survival of the United States as a republic. Although the South had been soundly defeated on the battlefield, the belief among most Southerners that insurrection was a worthy and noble cause, and that Black people — even if no longer enslaved — were meant to be subjugated to the demands of Whites, was still firmly held.

The 14th Amendment was meant to protect Black people against that belief, and the nation against insurrection, which was understood to constitute an ongoing threat to the future of our country. Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist who rose to become one of the most prominent voices of the Reconstruction period, had no illusions about the persistence of the “malignant spirit” of the “traitors.” He predicted that it would be passed “from sire to son.” It “will not die out in a year,” he foretold, “it will not die out in an age.”

Depends on your definition of age.

States of the former Confederacy and others saw fit not to apply Section 1 for nearly 100 years after its passage. And the Supreme Court let them, Ifill wants us to remember. It’s still contested nearly 60 years after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Section 1
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 3 is even more an orphan. No lobbying groups, powerful or otherwise, to fight for it. And that provision in Section 2 about reducing states’ representation for disenfranchising its citizens? It may as well not be there.

Section 3
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Ifill reflects on the reluctance of courts to enforce the 14th Amerndment even now in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and after a Colorado judge found that Donald J. Trump incited an insurrection, BUT:

The 14th Amendment is treated as a suggestion but rarely imposed in full measure when the status quo will be upended. This was perhaps most famously on display in 1955, in the case of Brown II, when the Supreme Court undercut its majestic decision of a year earlier in Brown v. Board of Education,by hedging on the immediate end to segregated schools and counseling instead that local officials should move with “all deliberate speed.”

The Colorado court’s approach to Section 3 continues this tradition. To find that a president incited a violent insurrection against the United States but hold that such a president can still run for public office — indeed to return to the presidency itself — could not stand in starker opposition to the words and spirit of Section 3.

The 14th Amendment has once again proved too bold for the judges empowered to interpret it. Political forces are at play again, this time fearful of a backlash if Trump is removed from the ballot. As this case makes its way through the appellate process and, most likely, to the Supreme Court, it should be understood in the context of how the timidity and unwillingness of judges to acquiesce to the judgment of the 14th Amendment’s framers effectively derailed our democracy’s promise after Reconstruction and until the mid-20th century. We must ensure that it does not do the same in the 21st.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that Americans are better at spouting phrases from their founding and governing documents than they are at living by them.

Remember when conservatives accused liberals of moral relativism? Yeah.